I thought the most exceptional case study provided in chapters 9 and 10 of Groundswell was the one that didn't succeed. The authors talk about one of their automotive clients whose marketers decided they needed a jointly authored executive blog since GM and other competitors had one.
However, they made a mistake I think we can all relate to--trying to convince someone of something that they will never agree to no matter how expertly you argue your case. The marketers spent 8 months researching and figuring out just how awesome their executive blog could be, and at the end of those 8 months they enjoyed this feedback from their bosses:
ur plan....iz poop.
There was no convincing these executives that "were being asked to live in the middle of the groundswell when they had not the faintest idea what the groundswell was." Luckily, the company's original founder had plenty of time on his hands and was already regularly engaging with customers and employees about new products under development. Hewas the guy the marketers should have been courting all along, not the "old-world thinking" executives who only saw the possibility of negative comments and losing control of their marketing message by introducing blogging. They didn't, and probably wouldn't until they actually saw it in action, appreciate the power of the groundswell. Embracing the groundswell is "making customers an integral part of the way you innovate, with both products and process improvements."
The marketers soon realized after their failed pitch that they would never talk their bosses out of their nonsense positions. They had to tweak their vision for the blog so it required only minimal supervision and thought-investment from the executives. They also addressed executive concerns about loss of control. The result was (I'm assuming...) a successful blog that began to catalyze an important mental shift in the company about the importance of engaging the groundswell. When your company embodies this shift, you start to "become so engaged with your customers that you walk in step with their needs and wants."
The Walking Dead represents the climax of a long-building cultural obsession with zombies that began in earnest over 40 years ago with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The season two premiere on October 16, 2011 shattered the cable rating records in the 18-49 demographic with over 7.3 million households tuning in.
If you been in hibernation from pop culture the past two years, this will give you a taste for the gory fare:
The Walking Dead enjoys a remarkably strong social media presence, and by no accident. The main reason I chose to track The Walking Dead is not because I'm a fanboy, far from it in fact (more on that later), but rather because, objectively speaking, their social media team is bar none. The Walking Dead's Facebook page boasts almost 6.5 million likes, with an impressive 755,000 "talking about about this." The mere reminder that the show's second episode (after a 2 1/2 month midseason break) airs tonight (2/19/12) garnered 14,000 likes, 1,000 comments and 700 shares as of 7 hours before airtime. Those stats alone are illustrative of an existing, robust dialog that needs almost no prompting.
2 days before first episode (2/10)
I had a fairly straightforward hypothesis that The Walking Dead's social media "stats" would pick up after the show itself picked up after its long midseason break. The numbers back this up. The first Social Mention (herafter SM) stats I took were from 2 days before the first episode on February 10.
Compare those to the SM stats from today, February 19, and you see notable increases in "strength," "reach" and especially "passion," which went up 12%.
The "sentiment" factor dropped slightly, but I quickly found you shouldn't put too much stock in this metric. It seems to be fooled easily, and can't, for example, tell the enormous difference in "this episode was a piece of shit" and "this episode was the shit!" You get a more accurate reading of what people think by browsing what people are actually saying and not taking SM at its word.
Today (2/19)
The most prominent trope is the continual debate over whether the 2nd season is as good as the 1st. A little context for the non-viewer is needed here: the pace of the first season was objectively quicker as the cast of protagonists search for answers and a safe haven in the infested metropolis of Atlanta. The group is constantly in motion, hopping from location to location, inevitably running into swarms of zombies readymade for gruesome, cinematically-inventive deaths. The 2nd season has much more deliberate pace and philosophical tone, as it maintains a constant setting at a comparatively peaceful rural farmhouse. The clashing sentiments posed in the two comments below essentially sum up the difference in opinion over this monumental change:
It's a debate I expect to rage until the pace picks up enough to satisfy those watching more for zombie dismemberment than so-called character or story development. You can tentatively put me in the former camp, but only because the The Walking Dead's attempts at character development has looked a lot more like lazy writing, plodding, wishy-washy direction and acting/dialog that is so laughable at times you'd swear they were going for the television equivalent of the Razzies.
The traditional, beat-your-customer-over-the-head advertisement is dead.
Viewers don't want to feel like they're being “marketed to” at all. In an age where you can skip commercials on your DVR and change tabs to Facebook while Hulu's loading, any media text that doesn't seek to entertain as much as it seeks to promote simply won't work. How outdated does this "hard sell" look? Yet 25 years later companies still employ the tactic.
When brands, like Jameson Whisky, stop insulting their viewers intelligence and deliver a beautiful, cinematic experience that actually engages viewers, they get trust and loyalty in return. In other words, an audience who actually cares.
I think it's telling the top rated comment is:
Jameson made their whisky an essential element to the story they were telling--the whisky is crucial, but only in that it advances the narrative. Notably, "Bushman1518" doesn't say it's his favorite commercial ever, he says it's his favorite story ever.
This is a prime example content marketing, a revolutionary concept I'll write more about in my next original post.
To bring this post full circle, here's a promo for the latest Black Keys album, called "El Camino," which makes fun of the "hard sell" used-car-dealerships-commercial trope to great comedic effect:
In chapter 5 of Groundswell, the authors make the astute observation that "your brand is what your customers say it is." The Ricardo Guimaraes quote the authors pull is perhaps one the best, most helpful and most existential passages in the entire book:
The value of a brand belongs to the market, and not to the company...it lives outside the company, not in the company...The brand is an open structure--(and management doesn't) know how to manage an open structure.
An recent, obvious example of a corporate structure royally underestimating their ability to control a social dialog was McDonalds "#McDStories" disaster. For those who haven't heard about this, click for some context or see below how some interpreted McDonald's plea for stories:
Let's get this out of the way--McDonalds really fouled this up. But it's a mistake to stop there. I think their PR mishap illustrates a few important things:
1. Just how cutoff multinational corporations can be from their popular, perceived (vs. internally espoused) brand image.
2. Just how on the money Ricardo was.
3. How, since Ricardo was on the money, these same corporations can't get away with the same old one-way PR tactics (talking at) in a two-way medium (talking with).
I have to say, in the case of McDonald's, I have no interest in dissecting how they could have avoided this. I welcome terrible, rotten corporations getting some modicum of a comeuppance. What's interesting to me is that they actually went ahead and tried to engage in the Twitterverse in conversation with, I can only assume, a genuine belief that it would make them look good.
But they were too used to how things worked in the old days. They thought only the people that've been receptive to the traditional "talking at" tactic for the past 40+ years would engage them and that the haters/naysayers would simply sit this one out. But they forgot one very important thing about of the Internet:
Dishonest corporations like McDonald's don't have the mettle to survive a truly social media platform. Any time they try something like "#McDStories" they're going to fail until their tone changes. The Twitterverse has to feel that McDonald's is willing to cede they have an overall negative public perception and show that they are actually interested in inviting a meaningful dialog to address concerns like animal treatment, food quality, contributions to an obese society, and so on.
If McDonald's doesn't realize that they don't get to control their brand image soon, it'll be time to put down the hashtags and stick to the hash browns.
