thebar.com on twitter

Normally, I just block all commercial twitter feeds as they can be pretty useless, nothing but advertising and one way messages wrapped up in the guide of social media. But when thebar.com started following me today, instead of doing my normal block, I thought I’d talk about it. Why? Because I used to work for the company behind it, Diageo, and I like to think that if I was still there I would have thoroughly advised against using the service in the way they have done. (But they still could have ignored the advice).

The Set-up

thebar.com is a US website, supporting all Diageo brands in the country, it’s seen as a portal site that must be coming up to three years old now. If a brand does not have it’s own site then consumers are directed there. (i feel perfectly comfortable in using the word consumers when relating to Diageo brands, whereas I tend to use customers or users elsewhere, as that is exactly what the people who buy the product do – consume). The site/portfolio with have a marketing team and a bunch of agencies involved in it to some extend. The idea to use twitter could have come from the internal marketing team or the agencies; my experience was that ideas like this tended to come from agencies.

The Preparation

There would have been an internal sell – why should we use this, what benefits are there to it, Hopefully, they’ll have gone through things like Jeremiah’s post on using Twitter. They’ve have thought about the audience, how they would respond to a company being on the site. Most importantly, they should have thought about how they can add value to the followers. Twitter is completely opt-in, I will only follow people I get value from. To attract my attention they have to send me what could be regarded as spam (it’s unsolicited and from a company) and then try and offer me something that is valuable enough for me to follow them. The other series of conversations they would have had would be with the various legal teas. The reason you find almost all the Diageo alcohol websites behind age checks is because of being responsible and only allowing people of Legal Purchase Age access to the sites. That’s what Budweiser tried to do with bud.tv – and failed because it was extremely difficult to sign up (I never managed it) and then the content was not good enough to overcome the barrier.

Twitter is not protected that way, so there would have been a lot of thought into what could be said and how it was said. That would be the reason that 20-25% of the posts promote responsible drinking.

The Delivery

So they went through a lot of preparation and discussion – congratulations to whoever steered it through – and now they have to deliver. And this is where it fails. I can understand the responsible notes, but the rest of the tweets do nothing, absolutely nothing, except give you a little polished line and a link to the site. My guess is also that everything you read has been legally approved as well, if not, has at least gone through various brand approvals, given the tone of them. It’s advertising, nothing but broadcast, one way, advertising, with a signal to noise ratio of 0 (or is that1??). It’s also most likely all in the hands of the agency and comes nowhere near the brand team.

As Brit says today, and has been said before, the biggest value companies can get from using these tools is to listen, to hear what their customers and consumers are saying, to get involved with them and provide a connection.

Yesterday, watching my Twitter stream, my friend Sean Bohan made the following comment:

new rules – RTFC – read the f’ing comments social means listening as much as talkin

How many of you follow this rule? The word social media has been tossed around A LOT during the last 18 months, but I wonder how much we really understand what it means. I believe those individuals who thought it had a set definition are now finding out that it’s much more fluid than they thought. Some people are content to shove out loads of content, but if they fail to hear what’s being said back, they miss important cues.

What would I have done?

It’s too easy to criticise, so let me tell you how I would have done it. First up, if the only way they are being allowed to use the service is as they currently are, then I would have advised not doing it. It’s advertising spam and the effort could be better used elsewhere.

What I would have done is:

• Have the profile, images etc, all link to the site. The name also stays, that’s the brand recognition
• Have the responsible drinking messages, albeit at a lower frequency. They too can link to the site.
• Every other message should be from the brand teams, letting people know what they are doing. Are they looking over new commercials, are they deciding on a brand extension. Let people know what goes on behind the polished messages. Be HUMAN.
• Listen to the conversation of the people you are following and join in. Diageo has the ability to attract some brilliant marketers, why not let them add to the conversation.

So that’s my take on this, a mistake from Diageo. Next step, direct message the person/team/bot behind the account and see if they will respond. They can tell me I’m completely wrong, that my take on this is erroneous, but what they really should do is listen.