Looking at the coverage on the TV and the Web, it struck me that the news stories did not have a strong voice from Maclaren and that got me interested in how the company was managing the crisis and specifically whether they were using social media as part of the campaign.  After all, the decision to undertake a recall of these proportions would not have been taken lightly or quickly by such an established brand and surely the media/PR planning would have been meticulous …

A bit of web searching unearthed a fascinating blog post from Harvard Business Review entitled “Maclaren’s Product Recall: What Would You Do?”  The post discussed the impact of the recall on the company’s brand and business and then put forward some strategies from crisis management experts originally included in an HBR case published in 2001 on an eerily similar theme.  I have summarised HBR’s recommendations below:

Engage a reputable, independent, outside investigator …

Hire a crisis management expert charged with setting up and training a permanent, internal crisis-management team comprising people from the operations, marketing, IT, security, and legal departments …

Call the babies’ families. Offer to meet with them privately and provide whatever assistance possible, including paying the medical bills …

Announce the recall in paid advertisements as well as issuing the joint press release with the CPSC [U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission] …

All of these recommendations make complete sense of course, but they don’t go far enough.  What jumped out at me was that the proposed strategies completely ignored the role of the Internet and in particular how Maclaren should engage with their customers through social media to get their message out, tell their story, rally their advocates, answer customers’ questions and respond to their concerns and fears.

This omission looks all the more glaring as in this case, Maclaren has not pursued an aggressive, nor systematic online campaign – as Time has noticed.  Just take look at the very tame official twitter account for Maclaren UK, or indeed the slightly more proactive (but still lame) account for Maclaren US.

So to answer HBR’s question, this is what I would do …

1. Hire an experienced community manager fast:  You need a community manager (more likely a small community team) who can take part on Maclaren’s behalf in online conversations across the Web.  This person or team will also be responsible for bringing these conversations into the company and will be a vital interface with senior executives, product management, customer service and PR. Believe me an agency could not perform this role for you as they cannot be an authentic voice for the company in the public domain, and they are external to the org, so cannot help you with internal co-ordination.

2. Make sure you know what people are saying about you and where: if you are to have a responsive campaign around the recall, you need to be listening to the multiple conversations people are having about you.  Use a social media monitoring tool like Radian 6, Scout Labs, or Nielsen Buzz Metrics, to understand how the issue is resonating on the web and the impact your campaign is having.

3. Take part in conversations across the Web:  Once you know what people are talking about and where, don’t sit on the insight, but use it to engage with your customers.  Don’t assume that having social-media powered conversation means putting up a page on Facebook.  For an issue of this type the most active conversations may be across multiple parenting communities and blogs.  Send your Community management team to listen first and then engage where the discussion is happening so they can clarify issues, help customers with information and put your side of the case openly.

4. Use Twitter properly: Don’t fall into the big brand trap of using Twitter simply as a tool to push out press releases or company information.  If you do that, you end up (like today) with a handful of followers.  You need to build up a following and use Twitter as another conversational tool. So look for who is tweeting about Maclaren and the recall, reply to them, follow them so you can DM them, and retweet your advocates.

5. Work with advocates and detractors: There are many people who are still on your side across the globe and of course many who aren’t.  What binds them is both communities are emotionally involved with the issue.  So work creatively with both groups and make it easy for them to share and pass on information about the recall through the digital media they use and the communities they are involved with.  

6. Facilitate discussion on your Web site about the recall:  You are really missing a trick with your Web site. It won’t be effective for you, if you simply use it to push out a corporate message. That well-intentioned light box message on the home page won’t change what people think, and is intrusive to people who are trying to find out information and get advice.  So junk it, and instead use your customer service area as a place of conversation with your customers.  At this stage people are more likely to believe what others are saying about you than your official messages, so creating a structured conversation on your site will work to your benefit.  A tool like Get Satisfaction is a good option here.

Making online conversations a core element of the crisis management strategy for Maclaren will also deliver longer term business benefits for the brand as it builds a platform and team who can absorb and act on feedback quickly from customers. This will only reflect well on brand, improve Maclaren’s customer service, and help in new product development, long after the PR storm from the product recall has passed.

And as for Harvard Business Review, well, good effort but need to try harder. Time to update the case methinks …

• Citizen journalism through formal networks such as Demotix (which recently had a photo used by the Guardian on the newspaper’s front page in relation to the G20 demonstration)

• Informal video reporting by members of the public that are not looking for a story, but just recording an event. The American hedge fund manager who filmed Mr Ian Tomlinson being struck and pushed over by the police at the G20 demonstration is an example of such ‘accidental’ reportage.

• Video activism: Protesters using video footage as ‘evidence’ of alleged malpractice or wrongdoing – an example here is the video of protesters challenging a police officer to identify himself by his number at the G20 demo.

Citizen journalists, video activists, and people like you and me with a digital camera or a Flip are new ‘social’ media agents. What has empowered these groups are the simple tools to shoot and share video and the massive consumption of online video through video sharing and social networking sites with the default of course being Youtube.

Does this mean that old media is now on the sidelines? Far from it. In fact, all three examples cited above got into the mainstream and amplified through traditional media, especially newspapers such as the Guardian and the Evening Standard that broke them as stories in their print and online editions.

But what has changed is that front page news that can in a matter of hours change the direction of a major story is as likely to come from footage shot by a member of the public as a briefing from an insider. As the American hedge fund manager commenting on the impact his video had had on the investigation into Mr Tomlinson’s death said “… You needed something incontrovertible. In this case it was the video.”

The perceived role of the Media as the Fourth Estate acting as a check on political authority has been rightly challenged – Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent being a particularly strong mauling. However, I believe that the concept can have real weight when broadened to include not just traditional media, but the new ‘social’ media agents (citizen journalists, video activists and members of the public) who are out taking digital pictures and shooting online video of the events around them non-stop all over the world.

The pen being mightier than the sword always seemed to me to be a hopeful statement, rather than something borne out in practice. However, I am now thankful and relieved that the video camera is proving itself to be more powerful than the police baton.

What we all want to do with social media is dialogue and share. For large enterprises, the opportunity is to engage with their customers in a more transparent and effective way than ever before possible through ‘linear’ marketing campaigns. But it ain’t easy…

Here’s my take on the obstacles facing Big Corp:

1. Understanding – social media is typically approached as just another route to market and this leads to a campaign approach with businesses majoring on ‘viral’ marketing and tapping up the blogosphere as a PR channel. By thinking in campaign terms, ‘social marketing’ is driven by the tempo of the marketing plan and is at the mercy of the quarterly campaign focus. However, conversations involving your business can start at any time and judging when and how to engage simply can’t be planned. Inconvenient I know, but nothing you can do about that!

2. Skills and confidence – marketing in Mega Corp is coming down to a reporting, budget and program management function with the doers being the rostered agencies. As a rule, traditional marketers, including those with an online background, have neither the skills, nor confidence to enter into a conversation with their customers using blogs, podcasts, and video or through forums, or social networking sites.

3. Process: One reason that marketers are uncomfortable getting stuck into the social graph as their day job is that they are not empowered to do so and may even be explicitly barred from doing it. In effect turning your marketing team into ‘spokespeople’ for your business is not something companies do lightly. But changing or indeed writing for the first time policies that enable employees to take part in online conversations is essential if businesses are to benefit from social media as a customer engagement tool.

Also the team developing an engagement plan using social media needs the freedom to procure services they need from a variety of suppliers most of whom won’t be on the roster. I’m convinced that as social marketing becomes core to the ‘plan’, purchasing of marketing services needs to become more like software procurements (project based) and less driven by the dictates of who is on the roster.

An outcome of these obstacles is that forward-thinking marketing departments that do see the potential of social media often turn to their agencies to define the strategy and lead the campaign. This approach is simply doomed to fail. Effective social marketing demands as its foundation transparency and proximity to the customer and cannot be done by proxy. Social marketing even transcends the boundaries of the marketing department. The best people to engage with your customers are those closest to the topic of conversation with the customer and this could be someone from the product, customer service or sales team.

So my advice to any enterprise looking to put Web 2.0 into the marketing mix is don’t get worked up about digital influence or going viral, but simply look at what your customers are talking about, understand what matters to them, and let your people join the conversation.