Tone-deaf advertisers: Teach them how to hear
Easy analytical tools available online can reap big benefits, writes Ryan Holmes.
Among big companies, tonedeafness — the inability to hear customers and respond thoughtfully — seems to be becoming an epidemic.
First, Pepsi launched a new commercial that co-opted memes and imagery from Black Lives Matter protests and Women’s Marches. Pepsi at first tried to defend the ad, saying it showed people coming together “in the spirit of harmony.” But faced with an avalanche of objections, it was pulled amid hasty apologies.
Then United Airlines dragged an already seated passenger from a flight as camera phones documented the whole thing. Worse still, United’s own CEO initially declined to apologize, instead praising employees for “continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right.”
A few decades back, this kind of detachment might have been understandable. Businesses were still relying on intuition and ad hoc focus groups to identify what would go over well with stakeholders (and maybe they just didn’t care … considering that camera phones and viral video clips were still decades off ). But the reality is that today every company has access to an instant, global focus group. It’s called social media. There’s really no excuse for ignoring your customers, unless you’re doing it on purpose.
THE ART OF SOCIAL LISTENING
Networks such as Facebook and Twitter offer access to and feedback from a diverse crosssection of customers, in real time and essentially for free. United and Pepsi each have millions of social followers across different platforms. Basic analytical tools would have allowed them to effectively A/B test different messaging, poll audiences on company policies and automatically gauge the sentiment of millions of engaged users around the world.
This concept of “social listening” is a relatively new approach, but it isn’t some advanced functionality that requires a team of number crunchers. In fact, you can do it on your phone. Just imagine if Pepsi had glanced at the overwhelmingly negative social outpouring immediately after its commercial went live. Better still, what if they had tested the message first with a small subset of their own followers on social media?
The United incident is an even clearer use case. The video footage went viral almost immediately, shared at a rate of millions of views per hour. Hashtags like #flight3411 cropped up, furthering the spread of news and outrage. To anyone doing basic social listening, the scale of the problem — and the need for a decisive response — would have immediately been visible, even at 30,000 feet.
You don’t have to look far to see examples of companies that are listening on social media and reaping the benefits. Take Wendy’s. The fast-food chain has earned plenty of accolades in recent months for its funny, sassy social handle, which has 1.6 million followers. Wendy’s adept approach to social media was driven home last month when a young man named Carter Wilkerson tweeted them asking “How many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”
Rather than ignoring the request, @Wendy’s noticed and responded — jokingly setting the bar at 18 million retweets. This little exchange went viral. Thus far, Carter has two million retweets and counting. All this adds up to some exceptional free press for Wendy’s — simply because they were listening for their brand mentions.
Meanwhile, the costs of tonedeafness on social media are only mounting. In United’s case, shares initially dropped 4.4 per cent, or nearly a billion dollars, in the wake of “bumpgate.” (Incidentally, a billion dollars is equal to one million $1,000 vouchers, the paltry payout the company offered overbooked passengers on Flight 3411 before ejecting them.) Some simple social listening could have spared much of this agony. In a perfect world, United might even have registered — well in advance — that seat bumping is a cause of serious misery among flyers. At the least, they would have recognized the backlash over the incident and issued an immediate apology.
Fortunately, the first step to reversing this trend is simple: start listening.
Tap into the trove of consumer feedback on social media and build a company that inspires users and employees … and one that’s built to last. Treating customers right isn’t just a sound business strategy, it’s the right thing to do. And it can be as easy as opening the right app on your phone.