At a recent conference in Europe, two
Disney executives tell the audience that Disney learned it needed to operate by
completely different rules when it interacted "socially" with a
consumer. Offering cross-sell deals, discounts and other promotions to email
newsletter subscribers was fine, but the company quickly learned that whenever
they tried to make such offers to the Facebook friends of one of their many
Disney characters, a large number of them took offense.
It wasn't just that the response rate
of Facebook friends was lower. Disney found that just making the offers
generated so much negative feedback and ill will that it was worse than no
marketing campaign at all. Disney
had accidentally electrocuted its marketing program by hitting social media's
"third rail."
This certainly doesn't happen to all social media campaigns, but
it is likely to happen whenever your business wanders across the unofficial but
sharp dividing line between what people consider "social" and
"commercial" activities. We can visualize the problem easily with an
example from the offline world:
Suppose you run into a friend who asks
you for a favor. His sister is just out of college and is trying to break into
consulting. Since you work at a big consulting firm, he wonders whether you
might be able to arrange an interview for her there. You say sure, you can
arrange that, you’d be more than happy to.
But what if, when he asks for this
favor, he says he’ll pay you $100 if his sister gets an interview, and another
$500 if she actually gets a job at your firm? Wouldn't you be totally put off
by this? Maybe he's not really your friend after all, you might think. This is
certainly not how friends do favors for friends.
As your firm revs up its social-media
presence you’ll need to keep in mind the very big differences between how we
interact in the commercial domain versus the social domain. We don’t often
think about these differences, but this story perfectly demonstrates how
obvious they are to everyone. They’re so obvious that if you do try to use
commercial-domain marketing in a social-domain setting, you will run the risk
of electrocuting yourself on this “third rail.”
Not that you shouldn’t ever offer free stuff and incentives to
customers via social media, but you have to think more carefully about how and
what you’re communicating to them. In a future post I'll take up the issue of
how to motivate brand advocates and fans without hitting the third rail.
Courtesy : LinkedIn
Article link : http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130318130854-17102372-beware-of-social-media-s-third-rail
No comments:
Post a Comment