Page 120 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

blog comments) has done an immeasurable amount for the Forrester brand. If
your CEO does not have time to truly commit to the online community, whether
Twitter or a blog, do not ask him to. It’s better that he have no presence than an
abandoned one.

Never let your CEO, or for that matter any employee, comment about your com-
pany on discussion forums anonymously. Although this may seem obvious, as
mentioned earlier, the CEO of Whole Foods Market, John Mackey, was caught
commenting on an investor forum about his competitors. He got into trouble for
trying to influence the stock price of his competitors.

When choosing SMM voices, be mindful of the PR disaster experienced by
Domino’s Pizza when two young employees at a franchise put up what they
thought was a funny YouTube video about sanitation behind the scenes. The video
went viral, and the CEO had to issue a major apology. The fallout was definitely
not funny. Although more junior staff may know the social platforms the best,
they probably also require greater supervision and education. This is because they
may not know the culture of the company that they represent or be familiar with
what’s good practice versus bad practice when representing a company to its
customers. This is why the SMM guidelines are so important. Those are discussed
later in the chapter.

CMO

Along with the CEO, another good person to play the SMM voice for the company
is the CMO (chief marketing officer). Often, she is closest to customers along with
the actual retail outlet employees, talking to them most often, hearing their com-
plaints, and feeding insights from them into new product development. The CMO,
as a result, is also a natural choice to be the SMM voice. CMOs are typically useful
for providing industry and company insights, building awareness for products
and services, forging deeper relationships with customers, and in some cases (but
rarely) sharing special discount and promotional information.

In 2014, Target faced a major reputational crisis when a letter from a disgruntled
employee to the Target leadership leaked out. The CMO, Jeff Jones took it upon him-
self to issue a public response via the Target blog and a LinkedIn post, as shown in
Figure 5-2 (https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140513221110-
3501295-the-truth-hurts). Jones responded in his own voice, in a deeply authentic
and transparent manner for which he won personal praise and helped redeem
Target’s reputation, too. It was especially powerful because the honest manner in
which he responded was very different from the traditional Target culture.

104 PART 2 Practicing SMM on the Social Web