frankly speaking

Social Media Failure - A Case Study

In early December, when I found out I would be heading to Salt Lake City for the Holidays, I decided to try a little social media experiment. I wanted to see how engaged the people running the twitter accounts of major airlines, luxury hotels and luxury automobiles were. The deal was simple: sponsor all or part of my trip and I’ll tweet about your company every day for the next 30 days.  The result:  these companies are not very engaged. In fact, no one from Delta Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airlines, The Waldorf Astoria or LandRover cared to respond to ANY of my tweets or Facebook messages to them.

Granted, there are a couple reasons why they didn’t respond a) because these companies have outsourced their social media management to an agency (ok, not really a good excuse but just go with me on this) or b) these companies are so inundated with requests that they just didn’t have time to get back to me (I have a hard time believing this was the cause because it’s not like the 25 year old who manages these accounts is obsessively updating the executive staff of his/her company on the current happenings of their grand social media strategies) or c) they simply didn’t think I mattered enough to respond.

I tend to think why I received zero response from anyone running social media from Delta, United, JetBlue, Waldorf and LandRover was the fact that they perceived I wasn’t influential enough (on the web) to matter. How they made this assumption is unclear. I tweet fairly regularly - 3 to 4 times a day. I have a decent sized follower base. My tweets tend to be pretty content rich (i.e. I don’t tweet stuff like ‘Standing in line at Whole Foods’). On Facebook, I try to update my status once a day. I have a few friends.

The point to me was crystal clear - these companies still do NOT understand the value of social media in relation to mainting good reltationships with customers or potential customers. For all of the above companies that I mentioned, LandRover had the most to lose - the lease on my car is up on 12 months and I was hoping that by allowing me to test drive one of their vehicles over my vacation I might have been convinced to purchase/lease from them in the future. I suppose they just lost a customer.