At the SXSW Web Awards on March 15, the Adobe presenter gave a shout out to “all the social media gurus in the audience” and a titter ran through the crowd. The reason it’s funny is that, certain people’s business cards notwithstanding, this whole business is simply too new for anybody to be an expert. Everybody is figuring it out as they go.
Here are a couple of examples of companies that are figuring it out. They’ll do as best practices until something better comes along, and they’re also good illustrations of why companies are so fascinated by the potential of social media.
- Everybody in the US knows about the Oscar Mayer WienerMobile: a funky vehicle shaped like a hot dog that tours America and shows up in the oddest places. In years past, someone who saw the WienerMobile might have told a few friends about it. Now, they’re likely to Twitter to a much larger audience… and Oscar Mayer’s PR folks are regularly searching the subject #wienermobile so they can respond to these posters, thank them for their interest and offer a coupon or just a continuing relationship through mutual following. (This illustration was presented by their PR consultant in one of the SXSW Core Conversations. Didn’t catch his name.)
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Steve Barnes writes Table Hopping, a lively restaurant blog on the Albany Times Union website. When he reported that Red Lobster was going to offer flame broiled fish, skeptical readers commented that installing a flame broiler is very expensive and they were probably going to just sear it with a poker. But then the Red Lobster president himself found the thread and commented that indeed they were going to install flame broilers with a plausible explanation.
Not only did this defuse the negativity in the comment thread, but it got a new post from Steve Barnes himself: “Check out comment No. 18 on the post below about Red Lobster. It’s from the company’s president — yep, the top guy of a 680-location chain — and it’s not a canned reply but one that addresses specific comments made by Table Hopping readers.”
That’s good PR you can’t buy, but you have to work for it. And what is happening here is that Red Lobster is monitoring comments throughout the social media space using a tool like radian6 or boorah, both previously mentioned on Otisregrets, to keep track of comments so they can be responded to.
Thanks for the shout-out, Otis! We also have a blog (www.hotdoggerblog.com) where we share some of our best stories from the road!
We hope you relished SXSW!
See what I mean about marketers tracking what people write about them? Props to YOU, hot dog guys at Weinermobile. And fast too! But keep your eyes on the road!
Otis:
Thank you for citing Red Lobster as a positive example in your article about social media marketing “best practices”.
I would like to offer one correction, however. We are now cooking with wood-fire grills, not flame-broilers. Our grills are operated by Certified Grillmasters who cook each order over burning oak logs. Flame-broilers, on the other hand, are typically automated and don’t burn wood. I would invite any reader to come to Red Lobster and taste the difference wood-fire grilling makes.
Otis, thanks for all you do to educate your readers.
Kim Lopdrup
President, Red Lobster
Those two stories are definitely some of the best examples of best practices in the world of social media for business. Furthering that, both examples have even responded on this very post, which I find both amazing and completely appropriate. If Radian6 or Boorah is really all it takes to track posts that mention something specifically relating to one’s business, it looks like it’s time for a lot of social media services to adopt them.