19 Oct 2011

week 10---preventing and managing social media marketing mistakes

Coordinated brand attacked
Brand attacked, it is a quite common issue in the current competitive world and competitors will use that as a strategy to beat that company down and the sad thing is that no one will care about the truth and people will continue to spread the news even though they do not know if it is real. Most of information can be found via the search engine, and the best way to consider reducing the exposure of negative event of a brand is give a positive response back immediately, trying to post as many positive responses as possible. But here is an issue as the article mentioned, there might be a case of what is being said is false, what we need to do not just only focusing on the search engine, but also try to use different ways to inform the original senders and ask for removing. However, what if you are not present to face the situation, I think the only way to tackle it is to use a series of back up implementation in case situation gets serious. And there will be two ways involved about brand attack, I suppose, one is before the attack, the other is after the attack, that’s, we need to prevent brand attacks, we can building up a warning system that monitor in which way would be attacked, or the company can keep track of those suspicious referral links. As to how to detect the brand has been attacked, the good ways can be employed is to monitor those blogs and blog comment fields, not just focusing on the content of the blogs.
If the brand has been attacked, the company must not avoid confronting the general public, instead, talking to their customers whatever the fact it is, which it is the only way the company can reduce the damage degree of the brand reputation and re-attract customers and that’s why I believe an outstanding brand or company will have set up a crisis response plan. When you give response to the general public, making sure that the word addressed to them must be realistic and truly listening more than speaking. But the company would better not to believe they can always deal with the customers very well, once customers have alternative choices to their products and services, they will abandon it without any reasons.


Exercise: A recent case myself
The case I introduce is about the rumors of Starbucks, as the article mentioned, the Huffington Post believe that CEO Howard Schultz Poaches Liquiteria Employee and hired veteran juicer Yohana Bencosme to train their employees about how to make fresh juices. The rumor has caused Jamba Juice stocks to take a tumble as investors do not believe the company can continue to make much profit as usual, but the Starbucks have been very quiet about the stock price.

As to the case, I think they have dealt with the rumor very well as one of representatives from Starbucks asked Huffington Post to release a statement on the rumors and admitted the employee Yohana has joined in, but refuse the rumor and did not talk much about it.

The reason why I think the representative address to the general public very well, it is because he make everything peaceful as he speak less about it, the company knows that the impact of rumor will be reduced and gone as time goes on, the good thing the company had done is that it delegates a person to show up give a brief response rather than avoiding confronting it. At least he has given response to their customers, the company knows it will be backlash which affect the stock price if they do not response it.                                                                                                         

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