Join Us on June 5 for Socialize Your Talent Strategy

Brandemix's Director of Interactive Branding Jason Ginsburg gives a sneak peek at Socialize Your Talent Straetgy, a free webinar on social recruiting.

Sign up for Socialize Your Talent Strategy here.

This fun, insightful presentation takes place from 2-3 pm EDT on Wednesday, June 5.

Social Media PR Disasters: World Nutella Day

It’s not often that social media PR disasters have happy endings. The Kansas City Chiefs fired the person behind their insulting tweet. McDonald’s may never be able to use the Twitter hashtag #McDStories again. Songs about United Airlines' obstinance are still racking up views on YouTube. But this time a brand finally backed down and listened to its critics – and avoided a much larger crisis.

The Brand

Nutella

·      17.4 million Facebook likes

·      10,280 Twitter followers

The Incident

Since 2006, blogger Sara Rosso has been promoting World Nutella Day every February 5, encouraging people around the world to try the hazelnut chocolate spread. The “holiday” is completely unofficial and is simply a result of Rosso's loyalty and love for the brand.

On May 16, seven years after the first World Nutella Day and three months after the most recent celebration, Nutella’s parent company Ferrero sent Rosso a cease-and-desist letter based on her unauthorized use of the brand’s name. She immediately posted the news on her blog and the World Nutella Day Facebook Page, saying she would shut down the relevant sites and stop promoting the holiday. Support from her fans quickly turned to anger at Ferrero.

The Problem Ferrero made no public statement and Rosso didn’t publish their cease-and-desist letter. So there was no official response from the brand to the mounting criticism. There was no explanation, no apology, and no mention of the negotiation which had quietly begun between the company and its biggest fan. The Response You can imagine what happened next. Nutella fans found the brand’s global Facebook Page and unleashed their fury.

And yet, for five days and 317 comments, Ferrero said nothing.

The Result

The story of a brand senselessly harassing one of its biggest fans – and her thousands of supporters worldwide – caught the attention of the Huffington Post, Social Media Today, and even Time magazine.

Finally, on May 22, two days before Rosso had to shut down her websites, Ferrero released a short statement on its Facebook Page. It read, in part:

“Ferrero would like to express to Sara Rosso its sincere gratitude for her passion for Nutella, gratitude which is extended to all fans of the World Nutella Day.

Ferrero is pleased to announce that today, after contacting Sara Rosso and finding together the appropriate solutions, it immediately stopped the previous action.

Ferrero considers itself fortunate to have such devoted and loyal fans of its Nutella spread, like Sara Rosso.”

Rosso posted the news on her blog as well, saying that “They were very gracious and supportive and we were able to have a productive discussion about World Nutella Day living on for the fans, which is the whole point.”

And World Nutella Day was saved.

The Takeaway

How can you avoid a similar PR disaster? It’s pretty simple:

- Respect the Superfans

Is something called “World Nutella Day” trademark infringement? I don’t think it matters. Sara Rosso loves Nutella so much that she created a special day of celebration to encourage people around the world to try it. There’s no downside to this. Ferrero should have rewarded Rosso, not punished her.

- Respond Quickly

All the public had to go on was Rosso’s blog post. No one heard Ferrero’s side of the story because it made no statements on its numerous websites or social channels. The company stayed silent even as the press picked up the story.  

- Don’t Let Legal Do the Steering

Ferrero’s legal team probably saw only a violation of trademark. The marketing department, I imagine, saw a wonderful grassroots celebration of its brand. If the two departments had discussed the matter before taking action, they might have come up with a compromise – perhaps asking Rosso to put “TM” after every mention of Nutella. Instead, the marketing and social teams were forced to deal with legal’s short-sightedness.

- Know When You’ve Made a Mistake

Ferrero expressed “gratitude” towards Rosso, but not towards her supporters, and it never apologized for its actions or its silence. Ferrero tried to excuse itself by referring to “misuse of the Nutella brand on the fan page,” whatever that means. The statement is vague and defensive, as if the company can’t quite figure out what it did wrong. But there are 317 Facebook comments telling it exactly that.

The eighth annual World Nutella Day will take place on February 5, 2014. I’ll be celebrating it. And I have a feeling Ferrero will be, too.

Need help navigating the new social media landscape? Brandemix specializes in social media for customer service, branding, and recruiting. If you’d like to reduce your risk of a PR disaster, we’d love to hear from you.

Are you using social media in your social recruiting? Your competitors are! Join Brandemix's Director of Interactive Branding on June 5 for a free webinar on using social channels to find top talent. Register here for free. 

Brandemix Bonus Reel: What is the Social Recruitment Monitor?

Special guest Ed Barzilaij, CEO of Maximum, explains how the new online tool his agency has created helps employers measure the engagement, interactivity, and reach of their social media recruiting efforts.

The Social Recruitment Monitor Revolutionizes Recruiting Metrics

I’ve mentioned it in the past, but now it’s out of beta and ready for the spotlight: It’s the Social Recruitment Monitor™, the first online tool that measures the engagement, reach, and success of brands’ social media recruiting efforts. Along with rankings of comments, retweets, video views, and the like, the SRM also includes two proprietary scores.

Engagement Ratio (ER) is a formula based on amount of posts, amount of interaction, and amount of fans/followers. Community Interaction (CI) measures fan/follower interaction with the employer and with each other. These values, along with popularity and activity, combine for an SRM Index score.

It’s an ingenious way of looking at social recruiting. For example, right now, Amtrak’s careers Twitter has the highest Index score in the country, 54.24, well ahead of Northrop Grumman’s score of 45.81. Even though Amtrak has fewer followers and retweets than Northrop, its tweets, replies, and follower growth make combine for a higher total score.

The Social Recruitment Monitor™ lets you shuffle the rankings however you want, so if you’re only interested in amount of total retweets, for example, just click on the Retweets column and, voila, the Air Force Reserve now jumps to the top, with 558 – and Amtrak drops to 27th.

Here are a few more fun facts I learned while exploring the SRM:

·   One of the biggest percentage increases in follower count was USAA, which rose by 8.5% to 1,104 followers.

·   Kimberly-Clark posted the most status updates on Facebook last week: 37, an average of five every day. But Union Pacific had the most Facebook comments, 375.

·   Even though MGM Resorts only posted six status updates on Facebook last week, those posts generated 78 likes and three comments, giving the hotel company the top SRM Index score of the week (43.45).

·   17 of the 20 top-scoring companies on LinkedIn have a Careers tab on their company page, a premium upgrade. The three that don’t? Union Pacific, Amtrak, and Walt Disney ABC, which also posted the most updates on LinkedIn last week, 17.

·   The employer with the most recruiting content on YouTube is FedEx, whose playlists add up to almost seven hours of footage. General Motors, in second place, has more than five and a half total hours.

·   FedEx also has the most total videos, but who has the most views? The US Coast Guard, the only organization on the list with more than one million video views.

The Social Recruitment Monitor™ was created by Maximum, a global employer branding and recruitment marketing agency. The CEO, Ed Barzilaij, told me, “Just having a social recruiting presence is not enough. An employer can only know if they are meeting their goals by monitoring, measuring, and comparing.”

The SRM is free. It contains scores for a number of other countries, including the UK, Brazil, and China. You can even add your own organization to the list and compare your social recruiting with some of the best in the world.

If you’ve been looking for ways to get internal support for your social recruiting efforts, this free online tool provides a look at your competition along with simple metrics to gauge your effectiveness. Try it and see what you discover.

And if you want to improve your rankings, drop me a line. My agency, Brandemix, has a long history of social recruiting success and we love sharing our expertise.

Employee Engagement: Important Yet Elusive

A recent article in Fast Company has once again shown how important employee engagement is to any organization. The more engaged the employees, the lower the turnover, the lower the shrinkage, the higher the customer service, and the higher the profits.

And yet, despite the preponderance of engagement surveys, software, and programs, true employee engagement remains an elusive goal for many companies. While there are several key drivers of employee engagement (corporate image, leadership, job function, work/life balance, managers) that require significant operational changes to move the engagement needle, below I present some tips that can be easily implemented and drive engagement results.

Better Internal Communications 
Treat your employees like your best customers or shareholders. Customers get fancy newsletters, interactive websites, personalized emails. Investors get elaborate annual reports. What communications do your employees get? Often it’s a simple newsletter with employee anniversaries, “articles” that are little more than press releases, and the latest information about open enrollment. Worse, they live forever on dull, decade-old intranets that are bare-bones, black and white, and boring – the 3 B’s of awful web experience. How can employees get excited about their workplace when the workplace doesn’t seem excited about them? 

Internally, your employees are your audience, and you should treat them the way you treat your most valued customers. That means creating internal communications that are interesting and entertaining.

Collaborative Corporate Social Responsibility
Some organizations have established CSR programs, allowing employees to select their own cause, which is a wonderful means to truly engage. Employees feel empowerment and camaraderie as they stay involved and seek volunteers for their own “social good.” They also feel a greater sense of purpose. Meanwhile, your organization gets great press and a big tax write-off. It’s a win/win/win/win!

Listening
Sure, this seems obvious, but one of the most frequent complaints I hear in client focus groups, is “Management doesn’t listen to us.” Just as social media allows a dialogue with your customers, you must find some mechanism(s) to create a conversation with your employees. Instead of a yearly survey, do it quarterly. Or monthly. Have an hour of “open door” meetings every week, where any employee can approach any manager in any area with any idea or concern. Use your intranet or enterprise software to let your employee collaborate and ask each other questions. Today, everything is crowd-sourced, from American Idol to Wikipedia to presidential debate questions. What can your employees teach you?

Little Things
There are many free or low-cost methods of employee engagement. Casual Fridays are just the beginning. Be sure to acknowledge employees’ birthdays and work anniversaries, whether it’s an email, an announcement at a weekly meeting, or an actual gift (I’m a fan of Starbucks gift cards). Bringing in treats every week or month is always nice – try cupcakes, pizza, gourmet coffee, or flavored popcorn. If you can’t afford to send employees to conferences, encourage them to attend free local seminars or online webinars. Give them a small “education budget” to learn software, read books, or subscribe to industry publications.

As you can see, there are all kinds of small ways to engage employees. There are big ways too – gamification, employee referral programs (ask me about this one), social engagement strategies. How to know what’s right for you? When looking at your engagement strategy budget, remember that, according to a recent Gallup poll, employee engagement can mean a 22% increase in profitability.

Want to learn more about these or other HR initiatives, including training videos, benefit communications, or wellness programs? Email me with your questions and I’ll help you out.

Brandemix Bonus Reel: What is a Brand Plan?

Jason Ginsburg, the Director of Interactive Branding at Brandemix, explains why a brand plan is so important to any branding or re-branding effort.

To learn how Brandemix can help your branding or employer branding campaign, visit www.brandemix.com.

The 6 Essential Steps to an Effective Brand Plan

The Brand Plan.  

The first step in any successful branding or rebranding effort is the creation of the brand plan. The brand plan provides a roadmap for creating, marketing, launching and promoting your brand, and is relevant for both your internal and external activations.

How do you create a brand plan? It can take months of research, discovery, analysis, and creative development, but here's a slimmed-down version to help get you started:  
Start With a Vision
Your vision statement is aspirational. It’s about the future, not the present; it’s who you want to be as a company and where you want to be in the marketplace. It’s a goal that you will try to attain for the next three, five, or 10 years. Don’t be timid! A vision statement can be grand, bold, and optimistic. It should be an ideal worth aspiring to. This step involves research and discovery from everyone in the organization, as they’ll all be asked to contribute toward the goal.

Plan the Mission
The vision is where you want to be; the mission is how you get there. How will you achieve your goals and how will you know when you’re successful? At best, a mission statement also includes a brief version of your company’s philosophy and purpose. As Entrepreneur.com says, “Your mission statement doesn't have to be clever or catchy – just accurate.” Spend time fine-tuning every single word, since your mission statement will be your guiding principles for the life of your vision.

It's all right to have your head in the clouds when writing your vision and mission.

SWOT it Out   
A brand plan includes an analysis of your company’s place in the market, broken down into four parts: Strengths – including your expertise, uniqueness, resources, or anything else that gives your company an advantage. Weaknesses – issues that may be holding you back from your potential; what knowledge or capabilities are you missing? Opportunities – such as an emerging customer need that you can meet, a new technology that will change your market, or a reduction in regulations or costs. Threats – problems on the horizon such as a customer need, technology, or law that make the market worse for your company.

Strategize Tactically
You now know where you want to go, how you’ll get there, and your current and future advantages and disadvantages. Now you can create a strategy that will help you get from here to there, using your strengths to take advantage of the opportunities and avoid the obstacles. This means creating a strategy, the large-scale plan for success. Within this are tactics, the individual programs, products, and initiatives that contribute to the strategy. In war, strategy involves which battles you’re going to fight; the tactics are how you fight them. Don’t get them mixed up or you can find yourself wasting resources on a tactic or overlooking the importance of a strategy.

Bring in the Numbers
Visions and missions can be “touchy-feely,” but a brand plan should include numbers. If you’re launching a new product, how many will be in your first shipment? What are your metrics for success – sales, hires, press mentions, social media responses? What’s the minimum ROI that will allow you to move on to the next step? And what’s the budget for each of your tactics? Don’t let your enthusiasm make you neglect the most important numbers – time and money!

Some brand plans are measured in months; others in hours

3, 2, 1, Launch!
The plan is in place. Now it’s time to execute. Put that new budget to use and start designing, writing, creating, and activating. After so much discussion and preparation, everyone will be eager for results. Help them out with a quick win, an easily achieved goal that boosts your employees’ confidence and builds momentum for the next round. Quick wins silence doubters and give you something to point to at the first few status meetings and say, “This worked.”

Your brand plan is finished. Guided by your mission statement, you’re implementing your strategy and tactics, making your vision a reality. You’ve made some quick wins, you’re analyzing the metrics, and you’re aware of both the perils and the promise of the future. You’ve put in place a solid foundation for success.

At Brandemix, we specialize in brand planning, brand architecture, brand positioning, and branding initiatives. If you’d like to learn more, contact me. I’d love to share our knowledge with you.

Brandemix Bonus Reel: Social Media Fun Facts

Jason Ginsburg, the Director of Interactive Branding at Brandemix, explains the secrets behind the most popular content on social networks.