Just occasionally one spots something on social networks that makes you think “Uh oh. This is going to end in tears.”
Towards the end of the afternoon yesterday I had one of those moments; a sponsored tweet from UK supermarket Sainsbury’s asking “Are you cooking with an unusual food tonight? We’d love you to share it using#FoodDiscovery”
Now, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you might have missed the scandal in the UK retail food industry in which traces of horsemeat have been found in all sorts of products labeled as beef, calling into question the very nature of the complex supply chains that now feed the nation. Ironically, Sainsbury’s is the only major supermarket chain to have not been implicated in the storm.
Looking at the tweets generated so far, it looks like they’ve got off lightly. But that this was a sponsored link campaign indicates that it was thought about and invested in – which does pose the question as to which rocks the social media folk at the company have been living under?
But putting the specifics aside, it does again make me question the idea of Brands being able to have conversations – whether through social media channels or more generally. People have conversations: brands tend to broadcast messages because, at their heart, they are inanimate objects. The people who work for them can have conversations, and often do.
Maybe it’s also a cultural thing: I know that my US colleagues have run a number of “competitor bashing” social media campaigns, and they see value in them but they tend to feel very counter-cultural in the UK (and not in a good way). But overall I (yet again) draw attention to Euan Semple’s doctrine: Organisations don’t tweet, People do.
WPP head honcho Martin Sorrell recently was quoted as saying that he didn’t see Twitter as an advertising medium, but as a PR channel. Whilst for small organisations PR can be a very effective proactive channel to get messages out, in my experience it feels that PR for big organisations is probably equally or more a damage limitation- rather that positive brand building-activity. In that world, Sainsbury’s campaign almost looks like a work creation scheme for their PR agency.
I also saw a tweet yesterday saying ‘Scanning twitter for comments about your brand is like “walking the shop floor with your customers”‘- I acerbically responded that only if your shop floor was exclusively populated with ranting sociopaths. People tend to turn to Twitter and Facebook to try to get brands to redress their complaints. It’s the old adage about a good experience being retold to one person but a bad one to ten (who knows where that random stat came from) writ large on a global stage.
I used to run training courses on light research methods. We used to counsel that the risk of listening to expressed opinions through customer surveys and the like is that you tend to get extremes – imagine a hotel where decisions were made purely on the responses from the customer survey cards left in rooms. If you look at product reviews on sites like Amazon you see this: if a product is “meh”, we tend to not be that bothered to go and give it three stars.
Proactively using social tools under the guise of an anonymous brand rather than in the names of its employees seems to be running a huge risk of provoke “no stars” responses.
mmitII 