Ideas for a Smarter, Faster World

[yellow tail] wine. Run a Google news search and you’ll see a couple small articles in agriculture blogs and webzines. Visit their facebook page, and they have a couple thousand fans. Start reading their FB wall, and you’ll be reading for hours.

How does a cheap wine with little news or substantial social media audience gin up thousands of social media comments / conversations in less than 24 hours?  Well, it seems that pissing off the agriculture industry will do it.  Their fans are, in fact, boycotting their product.  Their fans just signed up as fans just to tell the brand they suck and have, more or less, just lost another customer.

As one of the original critter wines, it probably seemed like a stroke of marketing genius when they announced their cleverly named “tails for tails” program that donated $100k to the Humane Society. However, as a business that depends on agriculture for its product, it probably makes sense that, in hindsight, the agriculture community didn’t find it to be such a clever program.  The HSUS’s efforts to advocate against factory farming haven’t resonated with animal farmers, who have recently mobilized online in a big way, and took over virtually all of yellowtail’s social media assets. The #yellowtail tagging is rampant on twitter, youtube videos are popping up daily, and at this point, any real [yellow tail] FB fans have rendered themselves moot or mute…take your pick.  Though in the last couple days, a few friends of the HSUS have started to voice their support.

As I sat down to write this blog entry, I kept trying to figure out what’s the angle here — that [yellow tail] should have done more due diligence before choosing a cause for their marketing efforts? Were they stupid to have not put two and two together?  Are they doing some things right — maintaining transparency, keeping their wall open, commenting on the issue? Or does the ag industry deserve props for mobilizing and giving itself a larger voice in the social media universe? Or do I critique the [yellow tail] response, which took more than 24 hours and came primarily (and very lightly) through Twitter and an indirect news release, with a weak defense of their decision?

Well, I’m going with none of the above and perhaps taking the easy road. They are doing some things right, but unfortunately, I suspect they are trying to keep this conversation limited to the few thousand people already engaged, and any larger statement or engagement risks exposing broader audiences to a cause marketing campaign that has now become politicized.

What I am going to write about is the challenge that still lies ahead for this brand.  Even though the comments have somewhat slowed and fans aren’t signing up as rapidly as they were Friday, I believe this challenge is just getting started, and I hope [yellow tail] is pulling out their crisis plan or making a new one as they go, because I don’t think they can wait this one out.

Here’s why (and here comes another one of my tangents, which if you ask my coworkers, I’m notorious for).  One of my clients recently engaged in a program with SheSpeaks, a word of mouth partner that helps brands jump start conversations and product sampling with women.  It’s a cool organization that does great work both on and offline, but I digress.  In a recent results report, they explained that for every 5,000 consumers that they engaged for our client, there was a good chance the word of mouth net extended to nearly half a million people. They got that little formula from MIT, which I’m not going to go into here.  What was more interesting was only about 1/3 of the women were blogging or using social media, so the average “passalong” of the trial with the first generation of women was to about 10 people.  Now I’m not a statistician, but I’m looking at several thousand comments from FB and twitter and imaging most of these people have more than just 10 friends in each of their profiles. I’m also imagining when people perceive a threat to their livelihood (vs. “thanks for the free $5 product”), they are more impassioned to tell more people — particularly likeminded people — about their concerns.  And the snow ball begins.

Mass media hasn’t picked this up yet, but assuming some degree of continuity, it’s not long before this goes into the stack of social media blunders, along side Walmart and Dominoes….only I think [yellow tail] could have a much bigger problem.  Most social media blunders can be fixed by a mea culpa / apology and change of policy. Unfortunately for [yellow tail], the only group perhaps more impassioned and more vocal than the ag community is the animal rights community.  They are stuck in the middle of two groups that are highly active politically, and a legal commitment they can’t get out of.Right now, they’re trying to quiet the debacle with a statement that the money will directly go to Animal Rescue initiatives, but the statements aren’t easy to find and aren’t very direct to their upset “fans.”

So here’s my question — is yellowtail damned if they do and damned if they don’t, or do they have the opportunity to harness social and traditional media here and go directly to the ag / animal rights communities? My theory is the sooner they accept that this isn’t going away, the sooner they can more actively and aggressively engage in this interesting dialogue swirling around them… Because right now, the only thing they’re doing is putting their “tails” between their legs and praying this doesn’t show up on Mashable.

Tags: Social Media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under Social Media, strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.