Digital Marketing Commentary (Now With 15% More Snark!)

I’ve been on the road lately, so I fell behind in my “Mad Men”. But I had to pause the TiVO when I heard Don Draper say, in last week’s episode:

“If you don’t like what is being said, change the conversation.”

That’s the most basic tenet of social media: change the conversation. You’re going to be talked about anyways, but if you’re involved, you can shape and shift the conversation around you. Instead of seeing change as bad, Don Draper goes on to explain, we need to greet it with joy and hope. In 1963, this means a lot of PR and working with journalism; in 2009, it would probably mean setting up an entire campaign on the theme of “Madison Square Garden: Shining Beacon To The World” and rolling out all the digital media buys and social media work to go with it.

Also, since I coined the phrase “response opportunity” as part of my “change the conversation” presentation to a client months ago, does that make me the Don Draper of my own small boutique agency employer? (Only, y’know, with less infidelity & stuff).

Best Buy is buying national advertising for a new “HEY LOOK WE’RE ON TWITTER WE’RE SO COOL” campaign, which now directs users to Best Buy’s “Twelpforce” page. Best Buy clearly decided that they wanted to:

(a) use Twitter for customer service (like @comcastcares)
(b)direct their national advertising call attention to that strategy.

To do this, Best Buy attempted to direct users to twitter.com/twelpforce. Hey, AdAge, make a note here: add this to your total free advertising estimates for Twitter. That’s basically what advertising a non-branded Twitter URL in a national spot is, after all – especially when you haven’t paid “Twitter” to put your logo or info on their landing page so that the majority of people, who don’t know Twitter and won’t type in the /twelpforce part, have no way to find or remember where they’re supposed to go.

Besides, while @twelpforce is the landing page (thankfully, they didn’t promote the @username format), the “Twelpforce” is actually an automated aggregate of posts that have the hashtag #twelpforce. This allows Best Buy to utilize the Twitter infrastructure to generate a running stream of customer service questions and answers. And instead of being reliant on one employee, as Comcast has, Best Buy has multiple employees who are voluntarily getting involved to answer questions – resulting in a round the clock hive mind of answers.

Twelpforce in itself is a great idea, but the national advertising is not. The Twelpforce concept isn’t even listed on the home page of Best Buy, and there’s no way to get from the Twitter page or even bestbuy.com/twelpforce (the aggregate page containing all tweets with #twelpforce hashtags) to the Best Buy offers and sales. If you’re going to blow money on national advertising media buying, at least put in some sort of connection to your actual business model, and encourage conversions to purchase – or in store visits.

Finally, Twelpforce isn’t going to solve the problem Best Buy is providing a solution for, in the minds of its customers and audience. The problem is that Best Buy is seen as being a big box store with crappy customer knowledge and poorly trained staff. They earned that reputation, which isn’t as bad as Circuit City’s was, but is still a negative impression. Twelpforce is a step to presenting not only a solution to Best Buy customers, but it’s inaccessible to the majority of Americans, who don’t use or understand Twitter. If everyone WAS familiar with Twitter, and could use this tool effectively, it would go a long way towards making customers feel more secure in their purchases, and definitely create a relationship that would result in repeat business and higher lifetime value for each customer – provided you can get them to buy at the store in the first place. It may help get people in the doors if they know they will get long-term support through Twelpforce or similar, but it doesn’t replace the basic sales training Best Buy fails to provide their staff in the first place. I never set foot in a Best Buy unless it is an emergency where I don’t have time to buy whatever it is I need online. If I’m going to buy my electronics in a place where I get zero tech support at time of purchase, I may as well do it online where the pricing is better.

Of course, I used to work for the Canadian version of Best Buy, Future Shop – which is now OWNED by Best Buy. Twelve years ago, when I worked there, while in college, the staff were trained more on sales than on tech. I’m a bit biased here, and my information on how well Best Buy staff are trained on tech may be out of date.

I think Twelpforce is a small piece of a bigger solution to Best Buy’s lack-of-support image. But it needs to be called out as part of that solution, and more needs to be added to make it a working solution. Twitter is hard to navigate because it’s a linear stream of text – forums, organized by topic, would be easier. A Facebook page might also be a good fit for the Twelpforce, where the issues raised on Twitter could be presented in an organized, open discussion format. Or a customer support wiki, which is also easily navigated. But I think Best Buy also needs to layer in more expectation for positive in-store experience, in addition to promising post-purchase support through volunteer employees. Come on, Best Buy! Pioneer some social media I can be proud of!

When a client expresses their fears at extending themselves in social media, I tell them not to be. The number one concern is negative user generated content, whether true, untrue, or just a misunderstanding.

To which I say…

1) If you get negative content from a user, and its unwarranted, other users will comment & respond on your behalf. This kind of brand evangelism actually strengthens the brand, because it is content in your favor that would not have been posted otherwise.

2) If the negative comment does have some merit, then it gives you a chance to address the issue in a public forum. You can reply in the same venue, and while you are ostensibly responding one-to-one, it’s actually one-to-many. The chances are good you’re answering a question that many people want to hear an answer for, and its a question or issue there wasn’t an answer for elsewhere.

This is a response opportunity because it’s a chance to show how much your brand listens to its customers. Its a chance to publicly address concerns and resolve problems. Its a chance to find out how you can make yourself better, as a company, as a brand. It’s not a crisis, or even a cris-a-tunity. It’s a real opportunity, and should bring hope, not fear, to an informed client.

I am blown away by the cleverness so far of Day In The Cloud, the Virgin America and Google Apps co-production. The “cloud” isn’t just a reference to what you fly through, either – it’s referring to the “computing cloud”, the concept that Google Apps embodies and embraces.

Virgin America/Google have followed some really nice best practices here with their setup:

Day in the Cloud Page

The page is nicely laid out, there’s a Twitter feed at the bottom of it, there’s “share” buttons, and by having people sign up for practice clues, they’re building an email list for Virgin America as well as for the event. They are also promoting the event through the official Google blog and through ads in Google Reader RSS feeds. Of course, Google owns feedburner so that could be how I was served the banner that led me to the promo.

I actually am a huge fan of the Virgin Air brands in general. I love their emphasis on technology – wifi and TV access on all planes. And this is a great way to get their audience onto their planes: people like me, who will share this event through Twitter and Facebook and blogging. My friends who read about this promo will also prefer to be on planes with wifi, TV and mood lighting. This totally eliminates the quandary of wasted media dollars, because the advertising will only self-promote to people likely to take interest.

Of course, Virgin is a perfect brand to pull off this kind of social media initiative, but they are also taking a big hint from Google’s best practices. I ran a Google search this morning to see how many results came up for the exact phrase “day in the cloud”, and only three came up that were related to this promo. I’d bet that when I run the exact same search in a week, the most of the first page of search results will be dedicated to this promotion, and it will all be part of UGC like this entry. I love seeing good use of social media like this.

1) “Bing” is not going to replace “Google” as a verb, because then it would be “binged”

2) When you launch your new search engine, it TOTALLY helps to at least own all the organic search results for that word on said search engine.

Bing search partial FAIL!

External Link: Search for “Bing” on Microsoft Bing