In the water or on the street

You have to start wondering if it’s something, if not in the water, at least in the drinks.

In 1987 ‘word got out’ that brewery workers were urinating in Corona Extra – an especially popular imported Mexican beer at the time. Almost immediately, sales fell almost 30% and it took a $500,000 campaign, dozens of TV appearances by the company officials, a team of private investigators to discover the source of the slander and a legal action to stop the sales decline. (The culprit, it turned out, was a Heineken Beer distributor in Reno Nevada)

Three years later a family run seltzer drinks company in Brooklyn New York began selling products under the name of Tropical Fantasy. It was the matter of being in the right place at the right time with a good product at a compelling price — and sales took off. In April 1991, there was a public buzz about alleged discovery that the Ku Klux Klan backed Tropical Fantasy and that it had a secret ingredient that caused sterility in African American men. Again, the cost was in sales as well as in the follow up campaign to set the record straight.

In 1992, Snapple, another Brooklyn bottled-drinks company was targeted by malicious rumors. Snapple had started almost 15 years earlier and had been so successful that its sales of non-carbonated drinks exceeded those of Coke, Pepsi, and Lipton tea. Annual growth was doubling each year, and in December 1992, the company raised $88M in an initial public offering where the initial stock price of $20/share was outbid immediately and began trading at $31.

If ever there was a fragile time in the growth of a Snapple, this was it. Within 5 days of market trading a story caught the attention of newspapers — Snapple supported the KKK. The evidence was on every label – a picture of a slave ship and a capital “K” with a circle around it. Never mind that the company was founded by three Jewish guys from Brooklyn, that the ship was from the Boston Tea Party, or that the circled K was a sign for kosher products: People who didn’t know any better could “see for themselves” that the rumor was true.

Snapple responded slowly at first, believing silly rumors a national company with a politically progressive image would go away. They didn’t. As news coverage spread, the bottling company began a massive rebuttal campaign – from placing full page ads in papers across the country, assigning road tours to executives who would be interviewed by countess radio DJs and local TV news anchors, and getting officials at the NAACP to support the company. Several months after it began the source of the rumors was traced to one individual in the San Francisco Bay Area who, the story goes, was forced to cease and desist.

Miraculously, sales declined only slightly during this period and Snapple went on to become one of the most expensive corporate acquisitions in US business history.

And if you think the world is much smarter and slander-resistant now that so much of what we do is informed by the information from the net … well, one last story.

As just about everyone in the country knows, not that many weeks ago the State of Arizona passed controversial new immigration rulings. For a large number of those outraged by that state’s new legislation, the best recourse seemed like some kind of economic retaliation. Coincidentally, exchanges begun in Twitter and fueled by conversations across the range of social media sites, pointed to evidence of close ties between the very successful Arizona Beverage Company and some of the new legislation’s authors.

What was different this time was that The Arizona Beverage Company was aware of how fast bad news can hurt revenue. Part of the reason they were so fast in responding to the allegations was that they saw the social media buzz developing the day it started. Within hours the company had hit every major social media site (and some pretty obscure ones) with the simple message that clinched their innocence: not only was there absolutely no evidence of any relationship between the company and any legislators, but The Arizona Beverage Company was in fact, located in a suburb of New York City – and had absolutely no ties with the Southwestern state.

…

What we learn from these stories is the critical importance of knowing what people are saying about your products, what they’re really saying – not from what you learn in elaborately planned and executed survey research or by way of finely tuned focus groups.

There are a lot of ways to do this, from tapping into forums using different scanning tools to engaging research teams – but the point remains: you’re putting your company at tremendous risk if you fail to keep listening to ‘the street.’

The face of your company

So..  convinced you need to put a human touch on your branding effort you remember you’ve got a built-in webcam and itsy bitsy microphone staring at you from the top of your macbook. You write a script, do a couple of dry runs and up-she-goes to your newly minted YouTube account.

Speaking as someone who’s video cameos have been labelled along a spectrum from “makes-Al-Gore-look-bipolar” and “scruffy-and-I-mean-really-scruffy” all the way to “what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-this-info,” I’ll state the painfully obvious — you’ll do a lot better if you get professional advice on personal presentation and message shaping.

For those of you in either the Bay Area or New York City (and environs), there’s someone you need to know about: Jennifer Flaa.  http://www.savorthesuccess.com/member/jennifer-flaa and http://vett2go.vettanna2go.com/

Don’t worry, it’s a silly rumor — everyone knows THAT

STORY: 90’s – pre ‘net biz world – a wildfire of a rumor spread that Snapple drinks supported the KKK. http://9mp.com/FKHYW

PROOF? Its bottle labels had a picture of a slave ship next to a large letter “K.”

FACT? It was a tea party ship (get it?) and the drinks were kosher.

RESULT? Three months of catastrophic sales decline and over a year of diminished growth.

So what?

Reputation management — monitoring what people are saying about you — shouldn’t be seen as a discretionary expense. It comes down to real dollars.  No-one may be slandering your products by spreading malicious rumors, but customers can get things wrong, or they can miss the point of important information that you want them to know.  You need to know. Sooner is better than later.

Friends of Mindshare Mining .. LinkedIn

Friends of MindshareMining is a new networking group on LinkedIn. http://9mp.com/9A81b Our first discussion question pretty much sums up the purpose of what we’re doing.

The irony doesn’t escape any of us that social media audits tend to be the products of very small teams of hired guns — you know, three consultants, a bunch of two-by-two matrices and a Powerpoint deck. That said, the people within the communities fostered by these social media environments are closer to what’s working, and what’s not, than any outsider will ever be.

SO – our question is “Can anyone think of ways the community formed by social media tools can be tapped to evaluate what’s working and what’s not?”

Our goal is to create an exchange of ideas where, just as in the terms of conditions offered by the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link a generation ago, “you own your own words.” What’s learned is learned by everyone. Find something useful and go and create your own tools and processes.

Please come and join the conversation. http://9mp.com/9A81b

Terms of Engagement

Blogging remains one of the easiest and most powerful ways a company can reach out and talk with customers. Allowing the public to see genuine human beings that talk about their companies, in voices far removed from the absolutely pitch-pefect nature of marketing, is invaluable.

That said, there’s a down side to the ease with which people can create and publish blogs. There’s a great (current) Inc.com’s piece, by Tiffany Black, “How to Handle Employee Blogging.” http://9mp.com/DbgIN

This isn’t a call to draconian restraints, or a return to messaging-by-committee. Rather, it’s a reminder that it’s to everyone’s advantage – both the people who write blogs, and current or potential future customers who read them – that companies have clear guidelines about how employees can (or can not) represent  their employers.

Perhaps most importantly, Black reminds us — all of us — that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel as we wonder about creating ‘rules of engagement’ for bloggers – we can see what others have done and tweak accordingly. To that end, Tiffany Black offers a half dozen full samples of business guidelines at the end of her article.

And for the Global 100, twitter rises to the top

Quoting from a recent Burson Marsteller release:

A recent Burson-Marsteller study found that 79 percent of the largest 100 companies in the FortuneGlobal 500 index are using at least one of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs.

Like the Fortune 100 study found, Twitter is the social media platform of choice among the Fortune Global 100. The study found that 65 percent of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter, 54 percent have a Facebook fan page, 50 percent have a YouTube channel, and one-third (33 percent) have corporate blogs. Only 20 percent of the major international companies are utilizing all four platforms to engage with stakeholders.

What caught my attention is a PDF of a White Paper from this global public relations and communications firm (there’s a link in the article, above)   — a thorough, and thoroughly professional approach to offering a social media audit for large clients.

What I didn’t see in that presentation was something we, at Mindshare Mining, believe to be a critical component of understanding the value of social media: a measurement of the alignment between what every company knows to be critical in convincing customers to buy and to return  AND  the topics of conversations in a broad range of social media venues.

Small biz use of social media doubles

“American small businesses are pushing the limits on new ways to improve efficiency in the prolonged downturn, including a steady increase in social media adoption,” according to the third wave of the Small Business Success Index™ sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.

SSBI reports social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year. Their key key highlights include the following.

• 75% have a company page on a social networking site.
• 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers.
• 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn.
• 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next year.
• 61% of the respondents use social media to identify new customers.

Read the full report on Small Business Success Index here.

Your company is NEVER too small to work with Social Media tools

In today’s Gist (and reposted in Mashable) – there’s a piece by Samuel Axon titled “How Small Businesses are Using Social Media for Real Results “ It’s a story worth reposting – and repeating.

You see this in almost every article you’ll read on this subject, and from people ranging from techno zealots who (it seems) have never seen a new type of technology they didn’t love to hard-boiled small business owners who’ve tried something and have seen results: using social media wisely increases revenue.

Social media tools give small companies new ways to give more exposure for their products and service. And it’s a kind of exposure that packs a lot of human capital: if there’s any single research finding from several years of watching the growth of these tools and venues – people are far more likely to trust a Facebook update or Yelp review from a friend (or a friend of a friend) that anything that gets pushed by the business itself.

As for Axon’s article – highly recommended. Great case studies, and equally great, practical advice.

Even the smallest businesses can profit from a managed web presence

Our friends at Outspoken Media have just tweeted about an important article – a reminder of the very practical reasons both small and medium businesses should pay attention to their web presence.

And there’s a down side to stories like this.  One comes from a local (San Francisco Bay Area) news service – about a small Oakland company dealing with bad reviews (see story here) and the other, from a restaurant down the street from where I’m sitting right now.

A few months ago a tiny take-out Chinese restaurant opened its doors. The neighborhood – my neighborhood, just to make it personal – is under-served by any eateries within walking distance. Now, here’s the thing: the place had decent food – if you thought about it as a-stop-on-the-way-home-where-you -could-get-Lo-Mein,-garlic-green-beans-and-spring-rolls.

The Bay Area has its share, both of foodies and (frankly) food snobs. The online customer reviews came in. NOT up to the standards ‘we all expect’ they said.

The owners of the Chinese restaurant didn’t even know they were being panned. Worse, some of the reviewers were simply wrong (basic stuff: parking availability, hours of operation, liquor license) and the restaurant – lacking even an email address (to say nothing of any social media presence) suffered. More than suffered. It went out of business.

What’s especially painful is that it could have been avoided. I spoke to the owner, saying he *really* should ‘get out there’ and counter some of these snooty comments. His reply was along the lines of ‘small Chinese restaurants never bother with that kind of thing.’ Sadly, it would have taken so little effort to have a blog, to reply to the yelp pieces, to have an electronic mailing list where they could, say, send tweets to regular customers about specials. To build an online presence that would have reminded our neighborhood that he was there, and that the restaurant was listening to its customers.

It would have been easy.

Lies travel fast, truth takes the scenic route

or: Why you need more than reputation management!

No questions asked – reputation management is terribly important. At times, critically important. As search engine algorithms change to accommodate the importance of ‘user generated content,’ a couple of dissatisfied customers can do remarkable harm — quickly — to your business. And until recently, ‘fixing’ these situations was something that only deep-pocketed (and large) organizations did on a regular basis.

That said, unless your small- or medium-sized company is currently wrestling with a reputation attack, spending money on locating where there might be, at some future point, a problem seems like one more discretionary item expense.  Yes, it’s important, yes I should do it, yes, should bad things happen – I’ll probably get a jump on the competition, but … there’re a lot of things like this — and frankly – for any time or money I’m spending, I’d like to grow my business … not prepare for disasters.

A better investment is looking at how clearly you’re getting the messages out about your company, your products, or your services.

-It’s a matter of determining what’s critically important for people to know about you, and then checking to see if those ideas are reflected in customers’ comments.

-And it’s a matter of checking to see if those ideas are reflected in online conversations about competing products.

So – what are your next steps?

1. You can certainly take advantage of the immensely powerful search engines – a DIY project for your marketing person – or team – to perform these kinds of queries.

or (and this will come as no surprise)

2. You can contact Mindshare Mining to see how we can help.