It’s a case history. A success story, to be taught at business administration schools. I’m talking about the internet strategy, created and implemented by David Plouffle, CMO to Barack Obama, who was able to engage via an online multimedia marketing campaign millions of people during the Presidential Elections in 2009.
Lots of gratitude for him, glory and White House for Obama.
The more I read this story, the more I realise how much the world has changed. Such a thing wouldn’t be possible nor even conceivable, only 3 or 4 years ago. The role digital media had in creating, enhancing and positioning a brand is bright clear.
Nowadays, the business world is suddenly finding itself submerged in a communication context that has radically changed over a small timescale. Radicalism and rapidity: two attributes able to confuse – and frighten – many PR managers and communication agencies who are navigating this new framework without the appropriate skills to deal with the new media.
There is still the “one-way-communication” mindset in most of the companies, where they pretend to announce to the audience what they want to say but then they aren’t interested to hear what audience wants to tell back. In the financial industry, this mindset is even more evident. And pathetic. Because this behaviour, due to lack of knowledge on one side and to fear on the other, will only achieve to the company an ongoing erosion – in the long run - of the competitive advantage of the business. But it’s “long term” and we know how invisible this turns to be into the everyday business practice.
Since social networks came to the front row, every business is now strongly responsible for every thing it says or does. It’s the consumer agenda which sets the values, not the corporate comms. And values speak and engage through the brand.
The brand is today the meeting point between people’s expectations and companies’ promises. Its value depends on how much they fit together.
To show this, let’s take, as an example, BP – Beyond Petroleum.
Ten years ago, the company started an ambitious rebranding program, which wanted to communicate the openness to new and more ecological projects in order to live in a better world which could reduce the amount of oil burned. A massive offline and online communication effort, focused on environment, and a rich agenda of CSR events/investments contributed to give value to the promise. Beyond Petroleum, indeed.
But how solid was this rebranding strategy? How much importance was then placed on maintaining the promise? How much efforts to deal and engage with customers? What has recently happened in Mexico, leaves us...thoughtful.
The oil spill in Gulf of Mexico simply tells us that the promises contained in the “Beyond Petroleum” brand were not maintained; that BP was still heavily “British Petroleum” more than anything else.
The explosion happened on the 20th of April.
Obviously, BP couldn’t imagine how devastating the accident was going to be, even though there were signs that it was going to get very serious indeed. Maybe acting on the upcoming concern could have been bubbling the importance of the accident, or perhaps it could have damaged the profits, the CEO and set lawsuits with shareholders for inadequate action. But a well-timed corporate action – managed by a carefully thought crisis management plan – could have shown sensibility and care for the environmental issue that was so prominently brought up in corporate news and advertising.
It could have maintained the promise the brand was claiming.
Looking at the facts, it’s an easy deduction to say that those US$4 billions, spent rebranding the company in these years, trying to erase the legacy of a tremendous accident happened in Texas in 2005 and which caused the death of 5 people, have vanished in just few days.
3 days after the accident, CEO Tony Hayward released the first communication and the first interview happened only two weeks after.
Once again, a huge mistake. First the lack of a crisis management plan, second the lack of media strategy.
The information is nowadays so fast and ongoing that is impossible for the board of whatever company to establish timeframes, to hide the news like it happened in the communist regimes.
Because there are gossips, spontaneous journalists, tourists, environmentalists, people who live there...and who is wired. They are all stakeholders of companies, like BP. They are all able to spread the news via Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and the likes.
Tweets, Facebook pages and comments, Linkedin discussions, blogs – some of them real mass influencers – fill the information gap left by the company and they are very effective in doing this. In those very same days, where BP was reticent to disclose, the company lost billions of market capitalization on the Stock Exchange. It’s so useless to hide behind a finger.
Maybe learning from this experience, BP implemented an online strategy whose aim was to influence and not to engage. They bought sponsored links which appeared on Google and Yahoo when you taped “oil spill”
Those links redirect you to a BP page where the company explained its version of the facts and where it championed its efforts to deal with the disaster.
It’s quite clear from the abstract showed in the image, that this is a “corporate communication”, not even willing to try to engage with the stakeholders, to collaborate with them.
Social media understood this very quickly and within days they bombarded BP through a subsequent Twitter account and a Facebook page (500.000 people) supporting the “boycott BP” tagline.
Apparently, BP learned again the lesson, and after a couple of months, it implemented a different communication strategy, aimed at people also in the imagines used throughout the website.
This is a new communication and branding era folks: there’s lots to understand and lots to do. Very quickly.
