John Lewis, a dog and a snowstorm

John Lewis has upset a few people, it seems. The final scene of its Christmas ad shows a dog left out in the snow, while a small boy pins a Christmas stocking to its kennel. To say this hasn’t gone down well with dog lovers and animal welfare campaigners would be understating the case.

Dogcast Radio, an ‘internet radio show and podcast for dog lovers’, has started a Facebook page to campaign to stop the ad:

Campaigners are encouraging dog lovers to complain to the Advertising Standards authority to get the ad pulled; but there are dissenting voices, too (one example: “It's an advert for goodness sake. You get Christmas cards from animal rescues with dogs in kennels on! There are far more important things to protest over than a tv advert!”).

I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of the ad. What I’m interested in is how John Lewis is dealing with this vociferous minority (for now, at least) and responding.

Here’s an extract from the John Lewis Facebook page, yesterday afternoon:

There’s no rule book, sadly, when dealing with these sorts of issues. It is particularly difficult to get it right when the group you’re dealing with are as committed and passionate - and as resistant to argument - as animal rights and issue campaigners.

John Lewis has done what should have been the right thing, in trying to take the discussion off Facebook, by inviting people to talk to customer service direct about their concerns. But in this instance, the retailer may have underestimated its audience. There’s a camaraderie between people with a shared passion. What’s ended up happening is that campaigners are sharing the responses they’re getting, and pulling them apart on the site.

These same campaigners seem to be concerned primarily with promoting their cause as widely as possible, to bring pressure to John Lewis, rather than taking up individual points of view with the retailer. They are putting pressure on animal charities to come out against the ad (which none have done, at the time of writing).

The other thing John Lewis has done well is to contain the issue on the channels where the comments are appearing, rather than over-reacting. It is responding to Facebook campaigners on Facebook; it hasn’t contributed to the issue by posting statements everywhere and giving the issue more publicity.

What I think it hasn’t quite got right is to send out identical responses to each campaigner on Facebook - so everyone can see that they’re not getting personal responses, bar a namecheck at the beginning of the message. I can see that if an issue gets to a huge scale, personalising each response would be problematic, but at the moment, it’s still just a handful of people (945 at the time of writing) complaining about the ad, and individual responses would be possible.

The issue here is, I suspect, that the ‘official’ response has been through corporate communications approval, and is not coming from a team of experience community managers. A more human face would show that John Lewis was listening and responding with a personal touch, rather than trying to ‘contain’ an issue as part of a PR exercise.

I spoke briefly to Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media management and moderation company, eModeration (disclosure: eModeration is a client of Carrot’s), about the handling of the Facebook community. Here’s what she said:

“We're going to see more of this happening as people use a brand's Facebook page as a customer service portal and it's great to see John Lewis responding. They could make the response even more human by addressing people’s concerns. One thing they could consider is saying clearly that the dog was not harmed and it was just part of the story. They could even link to the person who provides the dog, to look behind the scenes of the ad, which would make it clear that this is part of a story, and not advocacy of keeping dogs outside. In these situations, the brand must listen to concerns and address them clearly, but then steer the conversation away in a different direction. If you get it right, other people will help answer comments and complaints on behalf of the brand and spread the word.”

So, the lessons here are:
- Understand your audience
- Communicate with them in the most appropriate way, and individually when possible
- Listen to concerns, and respond appropriately
- Don’t create a firestorm where there isn’t one. Sometimes, the best thing is simply to move away from the debate.

Will it affect John Lewis? The retailer posted an increase in sales last week of 6.8 per cent over the same period last year, so I doubt it.


This post was also published on Carrot Communications' blog.

How to Avoid A Social Media Disaster in L.A.

On October 7th, eModeration joined forces with leading white-label social technology platform provider Reality Digital and presented the updated Breakfast Bunker Briefing: 'How to Avoid a Social Media Crisis' to an exclusive audience of top brands in the luxury surroundings of the the Andaz hotel in West Hollywood.

Our thanks to those who attended, and we hope they enjoyed the event, the chance to network in such great surroundings, and found the advice and information useful.

Below is the presentation, available on Slideshare:

Los Angeles version: 'How to avoid a social media disaster'

View more presentations from eModeration.

Avoiding a social media crisis - Glasgow style

Last Thursday, we held the second in our series of ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefings’, at the Glasgow offices of our social media partner, Yomego, and co-hosted by eModeration and Carrot Communications. The turnout was great, the bacon sarnies were delicious and the discussions threw up some really interesting questions.

The seminar tackled the thorny issue of how to avoid a social media crisis - and when you can’t avoid it, how to manage it (you can find the presentation here, and our white paper on the subject here).

One of the issues that came up was how to resource the management of a social community that operates 24/7, and how to spot (and filter) information that comes in through social channels. Some companies (like Gatorade) set up vast social media ‘war rooms’, but for many, this isn’t practical. There are a number of solutions to this; outsourcing moderation or community management to a company that can apply resource 24 hours a day is obviously one answer; or predicting the times that your community is most active and staffing them accordingly is another. Spotting and escalating issues that might affect the brand’s reputation is tied in with this issue, and brands are clearly facing the problem of how to spot an issue within a community and pass it to the right person within the company to deal with it. Brands must train their community managers and have a clear escalation process so that  issues can be spotted and addressed before they become fully fledged crises.

Another interesting question our audience raised was whether B2B companies need to worry about social media crises? If so, do the same rules of managing the crisis apply? It’s a really interesting question and an increasing concern. Our PR partners, Carrot, led the answer on this: although the audiences are likely to be smaller when a B2B crisis hits an online community, the impact of a disaster could potentially be worse: the communities are likely to be more closely connected; and B2B brands live and die by the quality of their service (as opposed to, say, Nestle, for whom the recent Greenpeace Killer Kit Kat campaign doesn’t appear to have dented sales at all).

Yomego briefed the room on social media monitoring, and were sympathetic to the generally-held view in the room that, given the volume of data presented by monitoring services, it was hard to see what was really important. Companies are looking for a monitoring service that provides some sort of context and understanding - applying analysis to help brands understand what they should listen to, what they should act upon and what can be ignored. If being submerged in a sea of buzz data sounds familiar, then Yomego’s SMR tool (which provides human analysis of the monitoring) is well worth checking out.

We also discussed corporate censorship (never a good idea); astroturfing (ditto); what travel companies can do about TripAdvisor; and even what to do about Blogger blackmail: bloggers who threaten negative coverage if their demands for money / movie tickets / free pairs of crocs aren't met. (Don't pay up).
We’ll keep posting on the issue of social media crises over at our ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefing’ blog, but if you have any comments, questions or observations on the best way to deal with a ‘social media crisis’, we’d love to hear from you.

Our thanks to Yomego for hosting the event, and to the lovely guests who made the event so enjoyable.

Another Breakfast Bunker Briefing in Glasgow

We've had such great feedback from our guests at the London 'How to Avoid a Social Media Disaster' Breakfast Bunker Briefing - and over 3,500 downloads of the presentation on Slideshare -  that we've decided to update the workshop and hold it again: this time up in Glasgow, where the Yomego offices are located.


Here's the skinny: several high-profile brands – from BP to Nestle, Eurostar to Toyota – have recently borne the brunt of social media backlashes.   So how can brands diffuse potential bombshells before they go off, and manage the fall-out if they do?

Specialist social media agency Yomego,  user generated content moderation and community management company eModeration, and content and communications consultancy Carrot Communications, have joined forces to provide you with the answers at a M^c Breakfast Bunker Briefing: How to Avoid a Social Media Crisis.

The battle plans are being drawn up at Yomego's Glasgow offices at 56 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow G1 3LX  at 09:00 hours on the 16th September 2010. We aim that when you leave (about 11am), you'll have clear practical insights into how to avoid, prepare for, and manage a social media crisis.

If you're available and can come to Glasgow on the morning of September 16th, then please email tia@emoderation.com or tweet me at @emoderation #breakfastbunker. Places are EXTREMELY limited, so please don't be offended if we can't fit you in - we'd be happy to keep in contact and give you the information after the event.

Breakfast Bunker Briefing: 'How to Avoid a Social Media Crisis'

On 14th July 2010, eModeration, Yomego and Carrot Communications invited around forty brands and agencies involved in social media to an exclusive workshop on 'How to Avoid a Social Media Crisis'. The seminar was held in Churchill's Secret Cabinet War Rooms in London SW1: an underground bunker whose very existence was a secret during World War II. Then, what went on in the bunker stayed in the bunker ...

But not now.

We're going to share our advice from the workshop: how to prepare for a crisis (create your virtual War Room), spot an issue before it becomes a crisis (social media montoring), how to communicate through a crisis (PR and community management), and how to judge whether your actions have been effective (back to monitoring again).

Many thanks to all who attended and we hope it provided valuable insight and food for thought.  Please do feel free to comment beneath and ask us any questions you may have following the seminar.

Here is a link to the white paper from the seminar available to download free, as are eModeration's other white papers. You can find out all about Yomego's social reputation monitoring service here.

And for those who couldn't attend, here's the presentation:

How To Avoid A Social Media Disaster (eModeration, Carrot Communications And Yomego)

View more presentations from eModeration.

Please get in touch with us if you'd like any more information.

Tamara Littleton (eModeration), Steve Richards (Yomego) and  Richard Houghton and Kate Hartley (Carrot Communications)