Disaster in a glass: When Coke lost its fizz

    There’s a famous line from the movie “The Matrix” when the evil Mr. Smith is holding the hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves) on a subway track as a train bears down on them. “Do you hear that?” he hisses. “That is the sound of inevitability.”

 

The social media “groundswell” described by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their bestseller, appropriately titled “Groundswell,” has been making that same onrushing train-in-a-tunnel sound for some time, and businesses large and small have found they either must snag a ride on it or they’ll either be left behind or smushed. The tracks are littered with the corpses of companies that waited too long to make their move (the honor roll of deceased newspapers alone would consume this entire blog).

The key line from the book is this: “Groundswell thinking is like any other complex skill—it takes knowledge, skill and eventually enlightenment to get there.”

Ah, enlightenment. Consider what access to the groundswell could have contributed to the awareness of the Coca-Cola Company. In 1985, in the pre-Internet days, Coke made the worst misstep in its history when the company ditched its original recipe and introduced New Coke. The reaction was so ferociously negative that after three months the company had to admit it screwed up and brought back the “old” Coke.

 

Coca-Cola had resorted to traditional marketing methods to convince itself that it could tinker with its iconic product and succeed: surveys and taste tests that drew generally positive results. But if Coke’s executives had access to social media, what would they have done differently? Some strategies they could have employed:

-          Created a Social Technographic Profile of its users to determine who would be participating across social media platforms and then introduce the “idea” of New Coke to key creators (Groundswell, P. 39), who would then blog, post and otherwise spread the word about the proposed product to Critics, Collectors, Joiners etc. who will either comment or at the very least follow the conversation.

 

-          Set up a private community (Groundswell, P. 82) where the company could engage its loyal customers, get their insights and even employ strategies that they might suggest. As Li and Bernoff note, if you don’t listen to the chatter in the groundswell, and respond to it, then you may never truly know what you’re company is doing wrong (or right for that matter).

-          Monitor your brand. My favorite story to date in “Groundswell” is that of the Mini-Cooper owners whose allegiance to their cars transcends measurable data. They don’t just love their vehicle for the gas mileage, but because owning one makes them feel special, part of a tightly connected community. Were the “Old Coke” faithful of 1985 any different? When Coca-Cola pulled their beloved soda, it was like they’d been betrayed. And don't think competitor Pepsi didn't take notice.

 

Your brand, Li and Bernoff insist, is what your customers say it is. Even a corporate behemoth like Coca-Cola doesn’t get to dictate those terms.

Selling Sadness

Who couldn't help but be appalled and saddened by the cellphone video showing 68-year-old Karen Klein, a school bus monitor in Greece, N.Y., being brought to tears by the cruel taunts of a pack of middle schoolers?

 

As a former high school teacher, who has witnessed up close the bullying of students, and even some teachers, I admired Mrs. Klein’s restraint while also fighting the urge to reach through the computer screen and duct-tape the kids’ mouths myself.

I wasn’t alone.

The video, uploaded to YouTube, went viral. Soon, Mrs. Klein was being interviewed by a sympathetic/outraged Matt Lauer on the “Today” show followed by dozens of other news outlets.

 

In response, a fundraising website, indigogo, launched a drive to collect enough money to send Mrs. Klein and her family on a nice vacation.

We’ll there’s nice, and then there’s NICE. When the fundraiser officially ended in late July, Mrs. Klein was given a check for $700,000, courtesy of donors moved by the sight of someone, who perhaps reminded them of their own grandmother, being mercilessly harassed.

This one didn’t shock me for a number of reasons. The traditional media seize on these kinds of stories, and social media now give them added life. When an emotional response is triggered, it’s an easy sell (for obvious reasons, stories about children facing peril spur similar reactions among readers/viewers).

Mr. Klein’s personal anguish aside, there is also a bit of brilliance behind indigogo’s inserting itself into the story. Yes, the website was doing a noble thing, but it’s foolish to think it launched the Karen Klein campaign purely out of good intentions. Their involvement can also be read as an act of blatant self-promotion wrapped in Good Samaritanism. By latching onto this story, indigogo broke through the noise to make crowdfunding suddenly seem mainstream, and aided its own efforts to make a competitive run against other similar sites like kickstarter.

The now-defunct humor magazine National Lampoon learned long ago that if you want to get attention, you’ve got to be outrageous, and the best way to be outrageous is to trigger an emotion – sometimes with an actual trigger. The magazine’s famous cover showing a dog with a cocked gun to his head with the headline, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog”  was one of the Lampoon’s all-time best-selling issues and was voted the seventh best magazine cover of the last 40 years. 

Think of the elements that make the cover work: dog, gun, threat. No less so, consider why people gave 700K to Karen Klein: grandma, insults, tears.

Other horrible things are occurring in the world, but the Karen Klein story evokes a visceral response because it unfolded on our doorstep; it’s an intimate, familiar event and we connect to this woman’s sorrow. (Some would argue too much so.)

The truth is, geographic and emotional proximity to an event makes the heart grow fonder. Try raising nearly a million dollars for an earthquake victim in Peru and you’ll be in for a struggle. But a weeping old woman on a school bus? Jackpot.