In case you missed this story, say, because you’ve spent the week in a sensory deprivation tank, here’s the short of it. Lowe’s had purchased time and was running spots on a new TLC reality show titled “All-American Muslim.” This ad buy evidently generated a number of complaints, whipped up, it appears, by a relatively (previously) unknown conservative group called The Florida Family Association. According to most reports, Lowe’s pulled its ads in response to these complaints. This action generated a firestorm.

Lowe’s RSJI score jumped 330 points to 391 on Tuesday, December 13. It jumped another 97 points on Wednesday, and then spiked a scary 469 points on Thursday, topping out at 896. (For comparison, the average RSJI number for 408 brands currently being scored by Media Logic was 46 on Thursday. The #2 brand on the Index, American Girl, scored 267. The previous record high score was 450, again by American Girl.)

Lowe’s number is clearly exceptional. And in this case, it is exceptionally bad. The question is, can it teach us something?

ABOUT MEDIA LOGIC’S RETAIL SOCIAL JUICE INDEX

Media Logic’s Retail Social Juice Index (RSJI), quite intentionally, does not factor sentiment into its scores. The RSJI measures engagement. Good or bad.

As you follow the Index, you will sometimes notice spikes in brand scores. If you trace those spikes back to their sources, you will find some are the results of promotions and others are due to big customer service issues, like technology glitches during major sales. Sometimes, even, arguments break out between customers. When this happens, engagement scores can really shoot up. The question is, when an argument breaks out on a brand’s Facebook page, what should the owner of that page do?

NOW, BACK TO THE LOWE’S STORY

On Saturday, December 10, after the news broke about Lowe’s pulling its ad buy, the company posted a status update to its Facebook wall that began, “It appears that we managed to step into a hotly contested debate.” With that sort of non-apology apology, Lowe’s only stepped into it deeper. The post made people madder. The argument only grew hotter. And Lowe’s, rather than confront the problem, did almost nothing for the next four days.

Between Saturday and Wednesday, Lowe’s allowed an ugly and very off-brand political argument to rage on its Facebook wall. Tens of thousands of comments were posted, many very aggressive and more than a few pointedly racist. Apparently, the company did try to exercise some very modest control (several people complained about posts being deleted), but active moderation by Lowe’s appears to have been minimal.

Finally, on Wednesday, December 15, Lowe’s deleted its Saturday apology post along with all 28,000 comments. It also closed its wall to fan posts, effectively deleting thousands of comments there, as well. At about 2 p.m., Lowe’s posted a new status update that read, in part, “For several days, our Facebook page has become a forum of debate surrounding a TLC program. … Some of the comments have been sharp and disrespectful in tone, but out of respect for the transparency of social media, we let the debate continue.”

Really? Do brands have an obligation to host open political debate on their Facebook pages? Frankly, in our opinion as marketers, and as humans, Lowe’s could have – and should have – exercised more control over its Facebook page immediately after the first openly hostile comments were posted on Saturday. As Media Logic Conversation Manager Carolee Sherwood says, “A brand has a responsibility in all its communities – the Facebook wall being one – to make sure the environment is conducive to community and respectful.”

WHAT’S A BRAND TO DO?

The manager of a brand’s social space has the same right – and the same obligation – as the manager of a store. Whether the argument breaks out in the aisles or on its wall, for the safety of other shoppers, the combatants should be asked to quiet down. If they don’t, they should be asked, or made, to leave.

*Media Logic’s Retail Social Juice Index combines several metrics measured over a 7-day period. Lowe’s RSJI number reported on Tuesday, December 13 factors engagement on the brand’s primary Facebook page and Twitter stream between December 5 and December 11.

There is no easy answer to this “chicken or egg” question. But there is no question social media is opening up (a quite public) window on the relationship between top retail brands and their customers. And though it is not necessary for retailers to prioritize openness – say, by defaulting likers to a “Top Posts” Facebook wall – not doing so (or being unable to do so), particularly when key competitors can, says something about a brand and offers clues as to how that brand operates in social space.

Media Logic has just completed a quick analysis of the relationship between brand sentiment/passion and the willingness of brands to prioritize customer posts on an open Facebook wall. We examined brands in three retail sectors – Department stores, Discount and Value stores and Hobby stores.

The accompanying charts generated by Netbase graph brand sentiment along the Y-axis and conversational intensity along the X-axis. The size of the circles is a relative measure of social chat volume. Short story: being in the upper right quadrant is good. Being a big circle in the upper right quadrant is even better. Being in the lower right quadrant is not so good. And being a big circle in the lower right quadrant is something a brand might want to work really hard to counter.

When we overlay wall openness with these circles, what we see is not terribly surprising. In fact, the results may even be a bit circular. “Passionately loved” brands generally default likers to an open wall of “Most Recent” or “Top Posts.” “Passionately hated” brands default likers to a wall of brand-generated posts. While none of the 20 brands measured here prevents users from posting to the wall, disliked and passionately disliked brands generally make visitors dig past the default brand wall to see complaints (or compliments) left by other likers.

This makes perfect sense. Brands that attract a lot of positive user posts no doubt find it easier – emotionally and bureaucratically – to promote those posts.

But maybe we should dig a little deeper. Because, as Media Logic has learned from a year of pretty intense study, the rules and opportunities of social marketing vary sector to sector and brand to brand. Let’s look at each sector and see if we can divine any general rules and uncover best practices.

Department stores

In the Department sector there are only two brands that prioritize fan posts, the medium-sized circle of Kohl’s and the tiny circle of Belk. A quick tour of their respective Facebook efforts shows Kohl’s exists in a special place, with a large enough and positively passionate enough fan base to make their wall all but self-policing. Negative comments are countered voluntarily by fans, with statements like, “If you don’t like Kohl’s, why are you a friend??” Belk has to take a more active role in managing its conversations. But the brand appears willing to make the investment, often answering customer service queries in a few minutes. And the general impression is that this active management is paying off – at least in Belk’s Facebook space – as the brand’s general page zeitgeist is positive, even joyful.

Meanwhile, Walmart carries the dubious distinction of being the most passionately hated brand among the 20 reviewed here. A quick trip to its Facebook page, not surprisingly, shows that Walmart defaults likers to brand posts. If one digs into its “Most Recent” or “Top Posts,” it’s easy to see why. Walmart, the 800-lb gorilla of retail, draws lots of negative posts. But as Media Logic has noted previously, the brand is hardly a passive social player. Over the last year, Walmart has invested heavily, not only in managing its Facebook wall and answering nearly every customer complaint, but also managing a solid, green-focused, Twitter stream. Walmart also seems to actively listen to the organic (and apparently largely negative) social conversation and respond to it through its community outreach programs.

As Walmart has been the fastest growing brand on Facebook for at least the last six months, it will be interesting to see if its active management of that channel can nudge its Netbase sentiment score northward.

Discount and Value stores

Among Discount and Value stores, four brands default likers to open walls, while three default to brand posts. Costco, Dollar Tree and BJ’s, default to the most open of open walls, “Most Recent” posts. Family Dollar defaults to “Top Posts.” Rite Aid, Walgreens and CVS all default to brand posts.

Sadly, the general theme for this sector is “missed opportunity.” There is only one winner here, and it’s a surprise. Perhaps because of its unfortunate poor sentiment and passion index, CVS has, over the last year, taken the most active position relative to its competitors. The Discount and Value brand manages its wall very actively. It also runs regular, well-designed promotions to boost its liker base.

Meanwhile, Dollar Tree, Costco and Rite Aid are squandering enviable positive sentiment and customer passion by letting their walls fill with scams and spam. These brands, along with Family Dollar and Walgreens, should look to CVS (despite that brand’s low Netbase score) as an example. In just over a year, CVS has attracted nearly a half-million likers with its actively managed Social Promotions and Social Stream Marketing effort.

Hobby stores

The Recreation sector, particularly Hobby stores, contains brands that have most benefited from maintaining open Facebook walls. In our group of six, only Party City defaults users to brand posts. It’s low sentiment score may account for the brand’s position here. But a quick review of its “Top Posts” suggests the brand could benefit from opening things up. For almost all Recreation brands, and certainly all Hobby brands, the Facebook wall has become a community forum, a place for likers to show off and share their handiwork. The only thing Hobby brands need to do, it seems, is run regular promotions to attract new likers, engage current fans and conduct a modest amount of policing to keep the spammers at bay.

As Media Logic has written before, a few Specialty Hardlines brands (specifically Bed Bath & Beyond) have seen great social marketing success by picking up cues from the Recreation sector and promoting actively managed open Facebook walls.

Conclusion

While there is yet no clear answer to the “chicken or egg” question that opened this article, top brands, including Kohl’s, CVS and Hobby Lobby, do point to general rules and best practices. And they also point to the value of active social media management.

Whether your brand can run a lightly-policed open wall or needs to default to a brand wall and actively engage negative social sentiment, there really is no longer any excuse for not investing in professional management.

Media Logic is a pioneer in marketing for a social world. We have created a new generation of professional marketing services, driven by active Conversation Management and powered by our social collaboration platform, Zeitgeist & Coffee, designed to help both B2B and consumer brands realize the full potential of social media.

Call us for a chat sometime. We guarantee that it will be worth your while and that we won’t try to hook you … at least not right away.

Want to know what Conversation Managers really do? Take a look at this video Scott Rodgers recently put together:

It took a bit of work to separate wheat from chaff for the January-to-March update to the Media Logic Retail Marketing Report. Most tracked brands experienced a slowdown in fan acquisition after the holidays.

But 15 retailers defied the general trend and posted continued fan base growth into the first months of 2011. What did they do? And what can we learn?

Gain access to the full article to discover what retail sectors and social marketing strategies are yielding the greatest growth on Facebook. Plus, view the complete Liker growth chart for the 100 surveyed retail brands.

Get the Full Article »

In mid-September, Hansen’s Beverage – a Corona, California-based beverage company – issued a simple legal missive to Rock Art Brewery of Morrisville, Vt. It wanted Rock Art Brewery to cease and desist the use of its “Vermonster” beer product label, as well as any effort to trademark the name nationally. You see, Hansen’s owns the Monster energy drink brand and, of course, there’d be a lot confusion between the two products:

Did you, uh, sense my dripping sarcasm? It seems pretty obvious that the two products appear to be visually quite different. So you can imagine Rock Art brewer and co-owner Matt Nadeau’s surprise when his legal adviser told him, “Not so fast.” Those unfamiliar with trademark and intellectual property law were as stunned as Nadeau was when he learned that Hansen’s could drain him in court – even though he was absolutely not infringing on their trademark. The legal advice to Nadeau: Get a new name for Vermonster and keep your business.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to Vermonster changing its name: Nadeau said no. The word “no” and some resilience lead to conversations with customers, which led to a forum post on BeerAdvocate, a community of passionate if not zealous beer aficionados. Forum posts led to Twitter posts. Twitter posts lead to #hashtags. Soon, a Facebook Group page was started by an upset fan and supporter of the Rock Art Brewery. Fans and supporters of Rock Art took to emailing Hansen’s and posting messages and pictures on the Monster Energy Drink Facebook fan page.

While the Rock Art Brewery community was rallying on various social networks, Matt worked on a video with Green River Pictures to tell his story of why he was not willing to just give in. Since that video posted to YouTube on Oct.14^th, it has been viewed over 75,000 times. All of the social media attention aroused interest from the local newspaper and on Vermont television. This combination of noise began to put enormous pressure on the folks at Hansen’s Beverage, who were refusing to give ground on the issue based on the notion that they might someday get into the business of selling beer.

That all changed when an investor in Hansen’s Beverage contacted Nadeau wanting to get right to the source. Nadeau spoke with the investor and simply asked to speak to the CEO of Hansen’s with the intention of coming to a reasonable conclusion. What exactly sparked that investor call is unknown, but it certainly was fostered by the combination of community activism creating momentum and interest from established newsprint, TV and radio outlets. That call with Hansen’s CEO was arranged and the two sides began to work out a mutually agreeable solution. At the end of the day, both sides were able to come to a solution outside of a court, likely much to the chagrin of a lawyer or several thousand.

So what should you take away from all of this? First, communities are powerful and highly engaged when presented with a passionate cause. Given the proper tools (which with modern technology are easily accessible) they will demand and expect a reasonable explanation and solution. We also see that those horribly pigeonholed traditional media are not so dead, after all. In fact, this story provides an excellent example of how new media and established media converge to make a complete impact. The social media flurry is not unimportant, but social media being plugged into established local media in Vermont will reach the interest level of larger news institutions such as the AP, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. That is what collectively pushed the story into the realm of something Hansen’s had to address head on.

Other take aways? Well, for starters, social networks are a serious place and if you are going to be there as a company, you really need to consider why you are there and who is speaking for you. In this case, as the conversation came to Monster Energy Drink’s Facebook fan page, a fairly significant conversational faux pas occurred. There was a flurry of dissatisfaction being posted on that page, but one of the earliest posts was met with the comment from the page administrator: “Nobody cares, get a life.” To be fair to the folks at Monster, and the individual responsible for posting and deleting that comment, nothing could have prepared them for what they faced in the last couple of weeks.

Here’s a “must” inclusion in the social networking handbook for brands: Listen first and then think twice before responding. Over at the Radian6 blog, Lauren had a very good post on how to handle negative comments recently. She follows that up with another interesting look regarding how to sort out responding to brand mentions in the social space.

There are several ways that the negative comments being posted to the Monster Energy Drink fan page and on Twitter could have been handled. I dare say we have a great tool to facilitate that discussion, and to arrive at strategies for not only how to manage your brand in the social space, but also to address these unanticipated events in a proactive and “social” manner. Don’t wait for the problem to come knocking at your door via a well-intentioned fan page or Twitter account meant for simple customer engagement. You need to be equally prepared to address the conversation that happens away from your community space. A well-informed and engaged community manager at Monster or Hansen’s with his ear to the ground should have been able to pick up on the storm that was brewing (pun intended) at BeerAdvocate. At worst, they could have been asking internally whether legal had this right much earlier in the timeline.

I speak to large and small companies on a daily basis and everyone seems to say the same thing: “We have to get in on social media marketing.” Some companies are taking the lead to do it themselves. They are establishing “social media” or “new media” or “digital media” departments that will head up the company’s social media initiatives. They are asking about tools that will monitor the social space and easy ways to distribute content. And of course, everyone wants to know about tracking and reporting. Some are going through a very rigorous exercise of shutting down renegade bloggers and using taskforces to establish guidelines and standards prior to foraying into the social space. And yes, there are still a small few who haven’t quite drunk the Kool-Aid®. For this article, I want to focus on the enthusiasts – companies that are eagerly entering the social media space.

To give you a sense of how many are doing just that, Facebook fan pages are being added at the rate of 24,000 per day. It’s clearly reached a critical mass, and most companies at this point are eager and enthusiastic to get going. Last year, companies exhibited a lack of urgency and interest in social media – this year, they are trying to more than make up for “lost time” and in some cases are forgetting their common marketing sense. For all the companies that are getting themselves “some of that social media,” I ask you to please take a deep breath and consider a few things before you drive yourselves – and your companies – down a wrong path.

First, do not establish a new silo in your company. If social media is leveraged correctly, it can influence and impact multiple organizational functions – not just marketing (advertising, direct, promotion and PR) but sales, operations, HR, customer service, product development and research. Social media should not be sanctioned to one department in a company.

Nor should it be the responsibility of just one individual. Do not think that hiring one social media specialist will answer all your needs. That’s like saying you need only one person to run the accounting office – they can do all the accounts payable, receivable, payroll, purchasing, employee benefits, etc. social media has moved beyond the lone-gun cowboy blogger.

Before you start tweeting, consider what you are trying to accomplish through social media. Social media can be employed for many different reasons. Decide how you want to use it and what you want to get from it. Is it to build your brand awareness and create thought leadership? How about brand preference and loyalty? Do you need to answer customer needs and enhance engagement? Are you looking to build traffic and new interest? Have you considered what it can do to help with gathering market intelligence and research? Do you want it for a recruitment tool? Do you expect it to drive sales? And don’t say “yes” to all – everyone says yes to all. What is realistic for your company? You may need to re-prioritize your expectations.

Once you have established your objectives, you need to sweep the landscape. Do a thorough vetting of what is being said and who is saying it. You should be able to capture information about keywords and themes relating directly to your company/brand/product; the opinions and perceptions of your customers, employees, partners and your competitors; and you should also be able to identify key influencers, what they are saying and where you can find them. Think of it like a social media messaging/media plan – you want to uncover where the conversations are happening, who is engaging and what they are talking about.

Now consider your company – are you conversation ready? Is your brand even in the conversation? Do you have something of value to share? Are you ready for a corporate-wide solution or is it better for you to focus on key markets or key products? Be very clear about what you can take on before you launch. Consider which social media platform will work for your needs. They are all different with varying benefits (go back to your objectives).

Don’t forget to consider roles and responsibilities, including internal hiring and outsourcing. There are a lot of tools, technologies and talent available to help monitor and manage social media. Do a thorough review of what is available before you start hiring staff.

And remember, just because you build a social media platform doesn’t mean people will come. You have to engage them and inspire them to participate. You have to have something of value that matters to them. Social media is a two-way conversation, a give and take. Do not just start tweeting out corporate news and expect people to follow you. Consider social media as part of your integrated approach to marketing, and leverage it for all it can do.

Social media gives real-time and immediate feedback – be realistic on what you want to measure (line it up with your objectives), and don’t get caught up in all the information that you don’t need. Use the data to help inform decisions, and don’t be afraid to test, learn and make adjustments as the tide of conversation changes. This is a whole new world, and a very exciting time in marketing – don’t panic, use common marketing sense and enjoy the ride.

Harness the power of social media. Register for your free presentation today and find out how you can use social media to build your brand and business.