Abridged with the author’s permission from The Adaptive Marketer.
Earlier this year we all watched as Nestle suffered a major meltdown (forgive the pun) with its social web strategy when they didn’t react well to the Greenpeace campaign.
Then, last week two more, which gave us a great way to compare strategies.
First, the CEO of Target came under fire because he had donated $150,000 to the group MN Forward—which is running advertising for a Republican candidate who opposes same-sex marriage. As you might expect, Target’s Facebook page lit up with people calling for a boycott.
Despite the fact that their CEO apologized and offered a statement on the matter, Target still hasn’t acknowledged on their Facebook page anything at all. They seem to be ignoring it completely. And look what’s happened. The conversation on their Facebook page isn’t about the donation, or even the boycott anymore—it’s now devolved into basically a Free Speech and Gays Vs. Straight Hate fest.
Now, you can argue that the amount of damage that a bunch of trolls on Target’s Facebook page is going to minimally affect their sales—but this isn’t the point. The point is if you’re simply going to ignore everything—then why even have a Facebook page to begin with?
Compare that to…
Jetblue has an employee go bananas on a plane, grab a beer, deploy the escape chute and pull a “take this job and shove it” right onto the tarmac. By the next night he’s a folk hero.
I personally watched Jetblue’s Facebook page light up over the next two days. Some commenters were screaming that he should keep his job. Others were saying that ALL Jetblue flight attendants were horrible. Suddenly almost everyone had something negative to say. And what did I see from Jetblue?
At first, silence.
But then, a few days later, JetBlue posted a relatively tongue-in-cheek blog post entitled “Sometimes the Weird News Is About Us.” It was short, to the point—mentioned that there was an investigation and that they respected the privacy of the employee (the reasons they couldn’t/wouldn’t talk) and pointed to a funny clip from Office Space acknowledging that yeah, sometimes we want to bust up a few fax machines—but that there are 2,300 other employees who are still on the job.
I went and watched Jetblue’s Facebook page. On the same day they posted the fact that they had released the blog post, there were 200+ comments to that status update, and then—it just seemed to fizzle. Life went back to normal.
And, as of today, JetBlue’s Facebook page is chock full of stuff that’s NOT related to Steve Slater. Sure, there’s some negative stuff there—but there’s just as much regular ol’ “I love Jet Blue” and “Hey what about my discount you promised me” and just life as usual for the Social Media channel
Here’s what I think they did so well.
- They waited for enough time to pass. So, unlike previous mistakes we’ve seen made when the company jumps and reacts too fast before all the facts are known—they waited. Maybe this was the lawyers—but it took guts for that Social Media team to not say ANYTHING.
- They took just the right tone. They didn’t speak in lawyer-talk or get all “concern for security blah blah” and shift blame. And neither did they roll over on their back and throw all the employees under a bus. They balanced the popular sentiment that, yeah, sometimes work is tough—but we’ve got two thousand other employees who are awesome. Oh, and here’s a funny video.
- They moved the conversation. By posting it on the blog—and then posting the Facebook update with a link to the blog. Again, no special fanfare—just moving the conversation simply and elegantly with a status update. Basically “go here and vent if you want.”
Robert Rose is Founder and Chief Troublemaker at Big Blue Moose, a Web marketing firm.
