Social Stature
ICC/Decision Services’ SMART tool helps retailers track and manage their social media image.
Whole Foods Market is one of the best in the industry at leveraging social media to connect with consumers. Its Twitter profile has more than 1.8 million followers, ranking it among those of celebrities, and it masterfully engages the more than 391,000 fans of its Facebook page with regular responses to fan comments to its posts (and each of the Austin, Texas-based grocer’s Facebook Wall posts draws dozens of comments).
Yet, when Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last year opposing government-run health care, we saw just how a brand’s image and reputation can be influenced by today’s connected consumers. In this case, unfortunately, the social media influence wasn’t positive.
Indeed, the backlash to the opinion piece was so strong that consumers who opposed it went a step beyond adding comments to Whole Foods’ Facebook page. They created a page of their own, named “Boycott Whole Foods,” which generated 22,000 fans in one week, tarnishing the grocer’s brand.
But just as social media can spread a negative message like wildfire, it can do the same for positive messages, too, and the natural and organic foods retailer leveraged this fact to get back into consumers’ good graces, by posting a note on its Facebook page that explained its position, and then by actually thanking those who provided feedback, and by reassuring consumers that they are priority No. 1.
This note, which was posted just two days after The Wall Street Journal story, staunched the social flow of negative opinion about the grocer — the Boycott Whole Foods Facebook page, while still active, has added only an additional 10,000 fans a year after that first week.
This is a perfect example of just how strong an influence social media can be on your brand’s reputation. It’s a much different world from the days of paper comment cards.
“Customers want to talk about their experiences,” says David Rich, president and CEO of NARMS member ICC/Decision Services, a New York-based customer experience management services provider that has served the grocery industry for more than 30 years. “Traditionally, how did retailers do it? They had comment cards. Over time, they started to use IVR surveys. As technology progressed, they started doing online surveys.”
With all of these tools, however, it’s the retailer, not the customer, who’s in control. “The customer could say what they wanted, but the retailer decided whether or not to act upon it,” adds Rich. “A lot of times, these comment cards just sat on a desk and no one looked at them, or they only addressed the really bad ones.”
Then social media changed the game, says Rich. “First of all, whether you give me a survey or not, I’m going to say something, and you can’t limit what topics I want to address. A grocer may not have space on a comment card to write about how you don’t like their meat department. Now I go on Twitter or I go on Facebook, and I tell the world. And that’s happening now. The retailer is still adjusting to the fact that they are no longer in control.”
Losing this control to the consumer is not necessarily a bad thing — empowered customers are more likely to share their shopping experiences via several social media platforms, and in doing so provide a ton of useful insights.
And just because a grocer doesn’t have a Facebook page or Twitter profile, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t involved in social media. If someone mentions your company on a blog, tweet, forum, comment or post somewhere in the social media universe, you’re involved.
But how does a grocer go about learning what’s being said about it in social chatter and maintaining a positive image online? Fortunately, companies like ICC have developed solutions for retailers to help manage their social media presence by analyzing what is being said about them in the social space and leveraging available social media platforms to better engage their customers.
ICC developed the SMART (Social Media Assessment and Response Tool) program with integrated customer satisfaction surveys to enable retailers to monitor the conversation about their brands and engage with their customers online to gain valuable insights, observations and ideas that can build their brands and improve customer satisfaction.
There are two ways in which a retailer can work with ICC and its SMART tool. The retailer can have ICC evaluate what is being said about it in the social media space and create an in-depth report on it, along with recommendations on how to address it via social media tools. Or the retailer can outsource its entire social media operation to ICC, which has social media managers who can manage the retailer’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, with guidance from the retailer.
“First, we’ll do a social media audit, which will give them a sense of where they stand with social media,” says Rich. “It’s a detailed search. We look through everything — blog posts, twitter posts, —and give them an idea of where they are, what the volume of conversation is, what’s the sentiment — whether it’s positive or negative — and so on. From there, we’ll put together scenarios that would represent the types of dialogue we should expect with the audience, and how to respond to things. For those events that occur often, we have standard responses. If we’re not sure how to respond to a consumer’s post, we’ll reply right away to them and tell them to expect an answer shortly; then we’ll go to the retailer for an answer.”
According to ICC, retailers can use the tool to:
- Become involved in their online reputation across all social media, including blogs, forums, social networks, photo-sharing sites, video-sharing sites and Twitter
- Build stronger customer relationships and loyalty with quick, authentic responses to customer posts and comments on social networks
- Engage consumers where they live, work and play, on the Web
- Optimize their strategies with actionable, real-time intelligence and up-to-the-minute data
- Influence the conversation about their brand, shape their customers’ experience and get the social Web talking positively about them And when it comes to grocers, ICC has a key advantage: Its COO is former Pathmark CEO Eileen Scott.
“She was a great strategic hire,” notes Rich. “I was spending so much time with Social Media Link, a sister company, that I needed someone to manage ICC. I needed a COO. Eileen is a former customer of mine, and I would meet with her every six months or so to get her input.”
Scott spent the bulk of her 30-year grocery career at Pathmark, rising through its management training program and holding a variety of positions, including VP of sales and marketing, SVP of nonfoods and pharmacy, EVP of merchandising and logistics, and EVP of store operations, before being appointed CEO in October 2002. At that time, she was the first female CEO of a U.S. public supermarket company and one of only seven female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Scott retired from Pathmark in September 2005 after successfully negotiating a $150 million private-equity investment in the company.
Not a bad person to have at your side when serving the food retailing community. According to Scott: “What’s more credible than that when you’re meeting with a retailer? I can tell them everything about the grocery business, but when she says it, it’s that much more powerful.”
“The retailer is still adjusting to the fact that they are no longer in control.”
-David Rich, ICC/ Decision Services
NARMS Gets Social
ICC/Decision Services isn’t the only NARMS member company involved in social media. Indeed, NARMS itself places great importance in social media and is involved in the medium in several ways.
“NARMS is using multiple social media formats to interact with its members and with the retailing community,” says Dan Borschke, president and CEO of Stevens Point, Wis.-based NARMS. Borschke himself authors a blog (www.danborschke.com) that addresses NARMS membership and meeting topics, retailing and economic issues, and technology and labor matters. In addition, the blog is linked to Facebook and Twitter, and has a robust following as determined by Google Alerts.
Further, much of the communication that NARMS provides its members is provided digitally and connected to various social media platforms to engage its members wherever they are, on the Web. “Of course, the concern is, how do we break through the clutter of the numerous options that the average member and Web information consumer has to source their news and information?” adds Borschke. “We make our communication vehicles available on numerous sites, and also make our messages available so that they can be linked to more diverse blogs and Web pages. It is absolutely amazing to see where your materials do ultimately end by just looking at some of the sources of the comments or replies.”
“How do we break through the clutter of the numerous options that the average member and Web information consumer has to source their news and information?”
-Dan Borschke, NARMS