Page 209 - Social Media Marketing

a coffee shop) in addition to the drinks and snacks they had already purchased. On the 187
one hand, restaurants in particular need to balance the needs of current customers—
enjoying conversation after a nice meal—with the needs of those waiting for an open ■ ╇ W hat N ot to D o ( and W hat to D o I nstead)
table. In this case, there were open seats and the group was spending money: predictably
the request for a cover charge resulted in a localized (to that store) uproar that quickly
spilled onto the Social Web. The chain’s preexisting participation in social media saved it.

A brand that was used to less than 10 posts per day from customers on Twitter
suddenly had a spike. Numerous posts were logged in a 24-hour period as people
jumped in—in technical terms, “piled on”—to the conversation. The brand team actu-
ally handled the event pretty well. Because they were already listening (again, credit to
them for participation in social channels in the first place), they were able to spot this
and respond quickly. They took action publicly (reviewing, for example, the motivation
of the store owner in requesting a cover charge when no such corporate policy existed).
The online team issued an apology, made amends, and wrapped it up.

But the “piling-on” continued, and that’s what brought the brand advocates,
who were also seeing what was happening, out in support of the brand. The advocates
saw the event, saw the appropriate response from Café Coffee Day, and then took
action as others seeking to cash in on the notoriety of the thread kept reposting, after
the fact. You can see the positive (green) and negative (red) comments in Figure€7.3,
and you can see that the positive comments rose as fast as the negatives. The entire
event was over in a few hours, and the online storm died out in a just a couple of days.

Two things in the Café Coffee Day event are important to recognize. First, the
brand was present in the social channels and so they recognized what was happen-
ing quickly. Then, second, they knew how to respond: Listen, acknowledge, correct,
and move on. The result was the emergence of a supportive crowd as the brand advo-
cates moved in and a fairly balanced conversation resulted—for every hater there was
roughly one lover. Had the brand team not been involved, the event would have sim-
ply gone out-of-control, unanswered, because without the brand’s public recognition
of the actual wrong, and the apology from the brand team to the bloggers involved
directly, the defenders would have had no ground on which to stand.

Even worse, real brand damage could have accumulated over time. For example,
the offending store owner—most likely totally unaware of anything “social,” would
have committed the act again, restarting the entire cycle and doing significant harm
to the brand as other similarly enterprising managers caught on to an opportunity for
added income, below the radar of corporate management. The initial tweets, posting
on the Social Web, combined with the brand team’s active listening program actually
paid a real benefit to the overall Café Coffee Day operation.