Although McDonalds is a multinational megabrand, it still realizes the importance of small, consistent personal interactions.
If you follow the brand on Twitter or Facebook, most posts are followed by an employee’s initials. You know WHO is sending you that message. In addition to the main @McDonalds handle on Twitter, each person speaking in social media for the brand has a personal page where they are empowered to get into deeper conversations with customers about McDonalds. A link on the page connects you with the photos and profiles of everybody who is tweeting and posting for the company. In fact, many interactions are followed up with a hand-written note sent via “snail mail” to take social interactions not only offline, but back to the restaurants. These interactions are authentic and human. A few fans have even created friendships with their favorite McDonalds Tweeters!
Likewise, the company’s PR department has “adopted” important bloggers in their industry. The PR professionals spend time going to the blogger’s “house”
to learn about the issues that are important to them. The McDonalds employees may comment on the blogs, help promote them and send them links that might be helpful to their information-gathering efforts (even if it is unrelated to McDonalds).
Why? Rick Wion, the leader of the company’s social media efforts told me that when McDonalds decides to host an event and invite these bloggers, every one of them will have a friend at McDonalds. That’s a company that “gets it.”
Building deep and meaningful human relationships … one small interaction at a time.
So a critical foundation of social media is providing consistent, meaningful provocations to remind customers that you are there, you love them, and you want to help them. This is really the first time in history businesses have had the chance to do this on a mass scale!
Now let’s peel the onion back another layer and start to explore not only the
“why” but the “how.”
Questions leaders need to consider
If a series of consistent, small, meaningful provocations can lead to customer connection and perhaps even loyalty, what would that look like in my industry?
What kind of provocations would engage our customers?
What social media platforms could potentially deliver this “drip, drip, drip" of communications?
How are our competitors approaching this? How can we do this better than them? Is this an opportunity to create a distinctive experience for our customers?
Are customer service experiences with our company positive or negative
“provocations?” Are we creating advocates for our brand or potential terrorists for our brand when we handle complaints?
How is every potential customer touch point a provocation? How can we turn touch points into trust points that encourage deeper engagement with our company?
3. The social media mindset
Every time we have a new technology available to us, we tend to force our old habits onto it.
For example, when we started making movies, we simply filmed plays at first because that’s what we were accustomed to.
When radio came on the scene, the first broadcasting pioneers recruited vaudeville stars like Jack Benny or Milton Berle to perform on the air because that is the type of entertainment we were conditioned to expect.
And I can remember, as a young marketer, helping to create our company’s first website by handing the web developer what? Brochures! We simply took the same copy and photos from the brochures and created our new website! Of course websites grew and matured to represent so much more but the adoption of new technology certainly repeated this pattern, didn’t it?
The same is true today. We have grown to love broadcasting, advertising, and press releases and that is what many companies are shoving through their social channels. Their approach to the social web is “A-ha! Another place for us to advertise!”
If you’re already a fan of The Tao, you have my permission to skim this chapter, but if you haven’t read this book, pay close attention because this may be the most important chapter in the book!
Behind every successful social media case study, behind every success story, you will find these three elements without fail:
Targeted Connections through the Internet named Tony Dowling, a business executive who lives in Wales.
Tony is an established and successful leader in the Welsh media industry but he knew that to be successful in the digital age, he simply had to understand, and master, social media. More than anyone, Tony knew the value of traditional media but he rapidly came to appreciate the value of this new mindset.
In an email to me introducing himself, here’s what he had to say about this subject:
I read The Tao of Twitter and was immediately inspired. As a media owner I like to keep up with the changes in the world of marketing, advertising, and communications, so I devour books like “Tao” and regularly, but never has one struck me so deeply and so quickly.
I had a flash of inspiration — a genuine, physical feeling — that hit me around the part of the book that talks about “authentic helpfulness.” I decided that I was going to try to follow this path, to stop selling and be selfless … to give back to the universe.
I was going to start out in social media, build a blog, and use Tao as my guide.
I decided to blog about what I know, and freely give away all the knowledge I had. My blog is literally called “Completely Free Marketing