For this week, I have been tasked with researching into how organizations misuse social media and social technologies. I have found a very compelling case which involves Chipotle and their attempt to gain attention by using social media.
The Company
The situation is as follows. Chipotle recently introduced some new products and stores into their organization and they needed a way to increase the amount of attention they were receiving so that customers would be aware of the situation. Someone from Chipotle's Marketing department thought that the best way to increase awareness of their brand would be to mimic a Twitter hack scenario. This scenario refers to a large company or organisation's Twitter account being hacked and they would have no control over what goes onto their Twitter page.
The Issue
on July 21st 2013 the following posts were posted onto Chipotle Twitter page.
Image credit to Arc
The Tweets made it appear as if Chipotle's Twitter account had been hacked. The company later admitted it was a publicity stunt and was part of their 20 day campaign treasure hunt called "Adventurito".
Chipotle Communications Director Chris Arnold told Mashable,
“We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people’s attention and make them talk, and it did that.”
He then admitted
“It was definitely thought out: We didn’t want it to be harmful or hateful or controversial…We thought that it really fit well within the context of our 20th anniversary promotion where we were putting clues in all sorts of things. We had clues pop up in a lot of places and thought that incorporating something into our social media presence would fit well into that promotion.”
The Reaction
During the short lived hoax an array of Chipotle's Twitter followers began replying to these messages most of them assuming that an employee of Chipotle who was posting these tweets was intoxicated or hung over. Compared to the standard reaction to most of Chipotle's usual tweets, the level of engagement for these "fake hack" tweets were high. The company also added 4000 more followers to their Twitter page added onto their already high 200,000 followers, a much fast growth than their usual 250 followers per day. However in contrast they did not gain any followers on their Facebook page, so overall the response from fans and customers was tepid to say the least.
Was it worth it?
Chipotle did add 4000 followers onto their already 200,000 however can this really be considered a success? More importantly will these new, ban wagon followers stay with Chipotle and most crucial will they be motivated to purchase anything. In the end, This entire event was to increase Chipotle sales, however what was the goal of this stunt? Marketers should understand by now that simply increasing followers does not gain you sales or brand advocates.
The most important issue from this is, do Chipotle's followers still trust Chipotle? Transparency is one of the main reasons for social media and social tool's alike, succeed. Consumers were sick to death of being marketed to, and social technology allowed them to cut out all of the middlemen and communicate directly with a brand. Building a social media following is supposed to be about building and maintaining trust between the the company and its customers. By tricking your followers to pay more attention to the company does that make the followers feel secure, feel as if they can trust this company. Furthermore was this act of publicity ethical? This act fulfills some of the main concerns and and risks regarding Enterprise 2.0 in general, such as Reputation and Reliability. This could seriously stain Chipotle's Reputation as a company and could force customers to move away from them, to add to this the Reliability of the company has also been tainted. By lying to the customers and misleading them, customers may want to follow a company that they can trust and rely on for truthful information and updates.
This also goes against a number of ethical principles described by Rogerson. These principles include Honesty, Professional adequate and effective and efficient action. These principles go hand in hand with each other and Chipotle broke all of them. The company was not honest with its customers, key example the fake hacking situation, was there a more efficient and effective way to get attention from their customers? yes of course there is, they could have done a Youtube video or handed out flyers, put up billboards and posters, there are many alternatives. Finally was the act professional or rather withing the limits of capability, This hoax was the easiest thing Chipotle could think of limiting their imagination and thinking capacity, and rather going with whatever pops into their minds first.
Conclusion
If Chipotle's goal with this stunt was to draw attention to the brand by any means necessary then they have completed their goal. However if the goal was to bring positive, long lasting attention and to encourage customers to buy, then it was a meaningless soon to be forgotten gimmick. How can Chipotle avoid this kind of incident in the future? To start off, according to the Social Media Policy Database Chipotle does not have a policy in place to hand online actions, this must be done immediately and training to all employee's must be provided. This misuse of social technology mainly occurred because they did not think about this course of action well enough, so to counteract this, take more time to think about your strategies and try to interact more with customers, This should improve overall effectiveness of future campaigns and will eventually gain the trust of the customers back.
This weeks question is, has a company that you follow regularly, done something like this?
