Social graph

Social Graph

Brands Connecting with Customers on Social Media: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

In this presentation from eTail 2013, Jennifer Cisney, Chief Blogger at Kodak, shares the photography giant's experience with managing large numbers of social media accounts successfully. Cisney demonstrates the need for careful planning before leveraging the social graph and gives concrete examples of actionable initiatives that any retailer can put to good use.

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Transcript excerpt:

...This is another example. We’re always monitoring as best we can what people are saying about our brand on social media, and we notice people starting to say that Kodak was homophobic, that they should boycott us, so within minutes, we were able to dig in to this and find out that people thought we were pulling ads from an episode of Degrassi Junior High that featured a gay character, and so they thought that we pulled that advertising from this. It wasn’t true. It was just a normal break in our advertising calendar, and we were able to respond very quickly and tell people that it wasn’t something that was done on purpose, that the commercials would be running again soon, and we got really positive response from customers and from people on Twitter that we were listening and that we got the story straight, so that’s an example of how listening on social media about your brand can prevent a potentially disastrous situation.

So when you’re on social media, don’t forget the social in social media; you need to be honest, open, and real. Obviously, don’t post as someone you aren’t. Don’t pay other people to say nice things about your brand. You’ll most likely, always get found out, and it will not reflect well upon your brand.

Another thing is always admit when you’re wrong. And we, certainly, we’ve been wrong plenty of times. We had a photo contest once on Flicker, and we used our standard terms and conditions, which were very strict saying that if you posted a picture that we own, we could use that picture for anything not realizing how many professional photographers were using Flicker and were very sensitive to that. And they quickly posted that we were out to steal their images, we were going to make money off their photographs which wasn’t what we were trying to do. We just wanted to have a contest and some of the ones we chose we wanted to use on the homepage of Kodak.com which most people get excited about having their picture featured. We weren’t putting it on packaging or billboards. So we went back. We changed those terms and conditions, and we posted, we apologized, we explained, and we got very good feedback from all of the users that we were listening and that we were willing to fix that mistake.

So the Bad - what happens if you don’t follow some of those good practices that I just outlined? Things go wrong. Some of the mistakes that we’ve seen recently...