As I stated in my previous post, the multitude of social media available for your organization is great, but not every platform may be right for you. Doing your research to determine who it is you want to reach and how best to reach them is the best way to get started when beginning to build relationships with your stakeholders.
Dairy Queen is a particularly good example of a company that uses several different social media platforms to engage and build relationships with their customers. The company has a blog entitled “Creating Smiles and Stories” that was launched in February 2009. Several employees at the company contribute to the blog, including Dairy Queen’s Chief Branding Officer. The blog is an easy to navigate outlet for the contributors to upload videos and podcasts, and to post personal stories, all while subtly advertising their product.
In addition to the blog, Dairy Queen also created and maintains a Facebook fan page (created in May 2008) and Twitter account (created February 2009), which has 730,000 fans and 4,040 followers respectively. Dairy Queen uses these accounts to promote new products, to give away coupons, and just to engage with its customers. Although all of Dairy Queen’s social media strategies have been launched fairly recently, look for yourself and you can see that they are working. Dairy Queen has done it’s research, and the company is successfully utilizing many different platforms to develop relationships with their customers.
Although specific types of social media can often work to you company’s advantage, customers often take social media into their own hands which can cause issues for your organization. How your company responds to those customer concerns can greatly affect future relationship building endeavors you undertake. Take for instance the United Breaks Guitars phenomena. Dave Carroll, a musician from Canada, flew United Airlines and experienced some terrible customer service during his journey. He witnessed United Airlines baggage handlers throwing around his Taylor guitar on the runway, and later discovered that they had caused $3,500 dollars worth of damage to it. In response to United’s lack of caring and response to his issue, he decided to write a series of three songs about his saga that highlighted the poor customer service he received and posted the videos on YouTube.
While United did eventually apologize for what happened to Dave, the damage was already done. This is a perfect example of a customer using a specific type of social media to affect a company for the worst. Viewers of Dave’s video sympathized with his plight and also offered up their own tales of United’s poor customer service. Ultimately, the video proved detrimental to United’s customer relationship building. Just something to keep in mind when evaluating the power of user generated content and it’s ability to affect your organization’s customer relationship building capabilities!
Any company diving into social media has potential for a very positive and/or negative outcome. Consumers are able to use these media outlets however they see fit. In Dairy Queen’s case, its consumers are working with them, following their blog, becoming a fan on their Facebook page and observing them on Twitter. Now with United Airlines, their mess-up with baggage handling backfired when a dissatisfied customer launched satirical songs on Youtube. Despite the outcome, being involved with customers and dealing with them on a day-to-day basis will help any company with future problems made public on social networking sites. Companies should not be afraid of bad reviews, but be prepared to handle them by being present online to intercept issues and remedy problems quickly.
I agree with you on all points. Companies that get a bad rep for failing to deal with criticism on social media channels often bring it on themselves. It’s just so easy nowadays for a company to use all the technologies available right at their fingertips to monitor and catch negative criticism before it gets out of hand. Excuses for lack of interactivity on the part of corporations are running out.