Major fuss today over on the Facebook page of Nikon, after it posted a status update that enraged many of its followers.
The Japanese camera company’s fans took offence at the suggestion that equipment was more important than the photographer.
Nikon received almost 1500 comments, many of which blasted the company for being too concerned about their own equipment and not caring about the craft of the actual photographer. The word ‘fail’ appeared a large number of times.
But was it really the awful ‘integrity suicide’ that many commenters suggested? I’d say no for the following reasons:
1) Nikon is a brand that sells camera equipment – why else would you follow them? Surely, they’re going to use their Facebook page to try and encourage people to lean towards more Nikon kit. OK, so their words were a bit hamfisted, but they were essentially trying to get people to talk about Nikon products. That may not have been the greatest use of social media, but fans complaining about Nikon trying to ‘promote’ Nikon are very misguided.
2) The number of complainants were very small. At time of writing, Nikon has around 841k followers on Facebook. Of that number, only 0.17% left a comment and not all of the roughly 1500 comments were negative.
Admittedly, you never want to get bad press as an organisation, but it wasn’t exactly widespread condemnation.
3) A slightly more semantic point on the original post. Agreed, Nikon shouldn’t have dissed the art of the photographer, but if it’s all about the person, why doesn’t everyone use a disposable camera to take photos? Why do snappers need to shell out on the equipment and lenses that Nikon were trying to promote?
Interestingly, what this does highlight – yet again – is how fraught with difficulty social media can be for commercial organisations. People want to follow their favourite brands, but it seems as if they don’t like them being too important and opinionated.
Nikon did post an apology, but it took them 15 hours to do so – pretty poor. It really shouldn’t have taken them that long to react to a crisis situation. To be honest, that was probably their biggest faux pas.
Ultimately, though, they’re unlikely to lose that many of their followers and in a couple of months, most people will have probably forgotten all about it.
Earlier this week I went to a marketing/tech seminar called Connectivity Crossroads (cue cheesy image on left), run by the agency RAPP and Marketing Week.
The thrust of the event was how to deal with the fact that consumers are now ‘always-on’ – a buzzword that I’ve seen used on numerous occasions in the last 12 months.
What, for me, was most interesting was the realisation by many big companies that they are no longer in control, when it comes to the web.
Refreshingly, Eurostar’s Emma Harris spoke about the PR nightmare that surrounded the snow in Christmas 2009 and its effect on the Eurostar service and what they learned from it.
Gary Raucher from Philips also gave a speech about their current campaign and the lessons they learned from their previous brilliant, but ultimately-flawed clown commercial.
Most of us who work in the interweb already know that people are always connected to you and your brand. Social media is a wonderful way to reach out to your customers and users, but can also come back to bite you on the rear end, if you’re not careful.
At the top of the seminar, RAPP’s Rik Haslam emphasised that sometimes it’s not worth spending ages planning something and that you should just get out there and ‘do it’, which is a motto I thoroughly applaud. However, it’s also important to be prepared if things do wrong.
And herein lies the dilemma. The bigger the brand, the greater the risk to their reputation when things don’t go as smoothly as you’d like them to. Undeniably, brands need to be connecting with their audiences online, but there needs to be some sort of strategy and risk and response mechanism in place.
Back in February, Paperchase were undone by a Twitter campaign over a disputed design. Astonishingly, Paperchase weren’t even on Twitter at the time and had to join expressly to try and rescue the situation.
Going back to Eurostar, although they were on Twitter when the snow problems hit the headlines, they were tweeting from an account that advertised their current ad campaign, rather than a Eurostar-branded Twitter handle. This was another learning and one that, hopefully, most major companies have now learned.
So what is the lesson from all of this? There were many from the seminar, but ultimately it seems to me that it all comes back to good practice on social media and the web, as a whole.
- Engage, rather than broadcast
- Be normal: there are still brands out there who are way too corporate on social media
- Be open and honest
- Don’t be afraid to apologise if things go awry
- Seek help and advice from your customers, when and where necessary. You’ll earn far more respect
Spotted this today in my Pulse news feed and had to share…
I did tweet earlier, but felt it deserved a wider audience.
Favourite bit is the post-script about his brother LMAO
Posted via email from Rob’s stream of web
