Swim with the Social Media Savvy

Here's a quick way to assess whether you are stroking smoothly in pristine waters with the social media savvy or swimming against the current toward the island of Yesterday.

Scenario: You're trying to fill a temporary public relations position and over 34,000 people from almost 200 countries apply for the job. Do you:

1. Ask yourself if you actually have to read all of those resumes?
   
2. Consider the opportunity cost of all those interviews you'll need to conduct?
3. Delegate the job of screening applicants to a someone else?
4. Ask EVERYONE who wants the job to post a 60-second video on YouTube?

If you answered 1, 2, or 3 ... you're definitely swimming to Yesterday. If you chose 4, consider yourself social media savvy. Now, if you want to be really strategic about it, toss tradition to the wind, forget the whole idea of resumes and just ask everyone who wants the job to create a mini-advertisement about themselves, and by extension, your company, cause or brand.

That's exactly what Tourism Queensland in Australia did. Their "Best Job in the World" contest, launched in January, was designed to find someone who would take an "Island Caretaker" job for six months.

What is an Island Caretaker? Someone who's willing to move into a three-bedroom beach house within the Great Barrier Reef neighborhood. And while the job does include a few menial chores, the real purpose of this $110,000 half-year position is to increase awareness of the Great Barrier Reef by growing a global audience via blogs, tweets, photos, videos and podcasts from down under. Tough work, but apparently someone's got to do it.

The winner, Ben Southall, 34, from Great Britain starts his new job on July 1. But the real winner may be the folks at Tourism Queensland who harnessed the User Generated Content (UGC) of over 34,000 people who used their social networks, their creativity, and their earnest desire to land what is arguably one of the best "temp" positions on the planet, all in a surreptitiously collaborative effort to promote what Tourism Queensland sells.

According to Tourism Queensland's CEO, Anthony Hayes, world-wide response to the "Best Job in the World" campaign has been "nothing short of phenomenal."

Within days of its launch the campaign became virally charged as applicants posted and shared their videos on YouTube and numerous social networking sites. The number of applicants was soon paired down to a more manageable 50, who competed with each other to develop an audience by entertaining and educating their online followers with stunts, stats and schtick that stealthily promoted the greater goals of Tourism Queensland.

The group of 50 was reduced to 16 finalists who gathered together on a sandy beach in Queensland for a heavily hyped final round of interviews and activities that led to the selection of a winner.

Tourism Queensland spent $1.7 million on the campaign to reap an estimated $110 million in world-wide publicity. So while their social media strategy was far from free, the ROI was nothing short of incredible. More importantly, Tourism Queensland proved a social media maxim:

When you dare to let consumers define your product, you lose some control but you can gain a boatload of publicity, the kind that money can't really buy.

Now, get back in the water and swim with the current.

The Domino's Effect

By now you’ve heard about the public relations “crisis” that hit Domino’s Pizza on April 13 when two employees at a store in Conover, N.C. posted a half-baked video featuring boogers, buttocks and bad pizza making on YouTube. Over a million people viewed the video before it was taken down.

Several personalities in the mainstream media referred to the incident as “Booger-gate” and invited their Twitterati to tweet them with thoughts on future pizza-eating plans. More than a few public relations experts commented on the brand-annihilating power of social media when used in such an unsavory fashion. A couple of market research firms presented fresh data highlighting negative consumer beliefs about Dominos as a result of the video. It had all the appearances of being an UGLY affair indeed. But was it really?

Well, let’s sink our teeth into this issue for a moment and see what social media maxims have come out of the Domino’s kitchen.

First, there’s no doubt than when a couple of misguided employees do something so idiotic, you’ve got a problem. And when a million people watch and refer the stupidity via YouTube, you’ve got a really big problem. But is it a crisis?

A quick check of the Domino’s stock price on NASDAQ (DPZ) shows that on May 1, two weeks after the dough hit the fan, Domino’s stock closed at $9.49, up $2.13 from where it was on April 13, the day the YouTube video first appeared. (To be fair, on April 30 Domino’s announced first quarter 2009 financial results in which net income was up 68% compared to the prior year, so the financials may have been as much a factor as the fiasco in Conover.) That said, the lowest point for the stock since the April 13 incident was on April 20, when it closed at $6.65, representing a weeklong decline in the share price, perhaps a knee-jerk reaction from the crowd of booger-fearing pizza lovers. By April 21, however, the stock was heading up again with significantly more trading activity than during the previous down week. This does not suggest that the market sees Domino’s Pizza as a company in crisis. Nor should you.

Second, it seems that the Domino’s Pizza senior management team responded to the incident in a serious and sensitive manner with a YouTube posting of their own, designed no doubt to reassure their YouTube-watching consumers that the food at Domino’s was safe and that the inappropriate video was a prank. Domino’s corporate also created a Twitter account on April 15 to help deal with the situation with the alacrity that Twitter affords us all. Most importantly, the company didn’t overreact, but they did assess the magnitude of the problem from a “good sense” perspective.

What is a “good sense” perspective? They relied upon the collective wisdom of their consumers and the public. Most reasonable people can sympathize with Domino’s situation; it’s clear that the video was a prank. Does anyone possibly believe that the Domino’s recipe book calls for the outrageous ingredients and preparation methods highlighted in the prank video? It’s unlikely. But how about the consumer opinion research showing that "65% of respondents who would previously visit or order Domino’s Pizza, were less likely to do so after viewing [the] 'prank' video” on YouTube?" Would you really expect different results if you were to show people a video of how sausage is made? Or how about if you ask 250 people if they are likely to eat peanut butter now that they know each large jar is allowed by US Government standards to have up to two partial rodent hairs and various insect parts? Yum. Context is everything in this kind of research.

Now, if a YouTube video revealed that Domino’s Pizza knowingly uses child labor in China to harvest radio-active wheat that is then used to make pizza dough in Dubuque … well that would be a real crisis. So what social media maxims are at work here?

1. Social media is about engaging people via four pillars: communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment. (The video caper in Conover was an ill-advised attempt at entertainment. The reaction of Domino’s Pizza was a quickly orchestrated use of all four pillars to combat negative PR.)
2. Social media is about enabling conversations. (Plenty of that took place.)
3. You cannot control conversations, but you can influence them. (Like it or not in the world of social media, you don’t have the brand control that you once did. Your customers can and will define who you are and what you stand for.)
4. Influence is the bedrock upon which all economically viable relationships are built. (Tip-hungry pizza delivery people surely know this maxim.)
5. Consumers possess a collective intelligence that uses social media in a self-corrective manner. The wisdom of the many will trump the idiocy of the few. (Which is what we’ve seen with “Booger-gate.”)
   

So, now that you know the rest of the story—from a social media perspective—how about we order a few pizzas and see what’s new on YouTube?