Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Mon, Feb 09, 2009 @ 06:14 AM
My friend Janet Johnson and long time blogger and social media expert...wrote of her recent learning as she helped her client Academic Network spring into action as the news of the Salmonella Typhimurium began to unfold. (They're a Stericycle company, whose job it is to help manage recalled peanut and peanut paste products by getting them out of stores and destroying them.)
Having set up the listening systems for her client, they were able to listen and anticipate--predicting things before it hit the broader media.
Anticipating Risks to Mitigate Them
To illustrate this, Janet writes in Stop Spreading Peanut Butter Fear:
"We started monitoring the web (Twitter, Facebook, other social media sites) for conversations about peanuts, and the experience was quite amazing.
Some highlights:
- We were able to predict the spread of the recall from people to pet food - days before any announcement
- We predicted the spread of fear from peanut products to peanut butter in jars weeks before peanut butter jar sales dropped off by 25%
- We reached out to associations (like the Grocery Manufacturer's Association and the American Peanut Council) to help them handle the huge job of getting the right information out to people online. No one listened.
- People talk about peanut butteronline a lot (probably second only to bacon) and we watched the hysteria grow exponentially the day after the inauguration, when Tweets and posts like this appeared:
...and it really hasn't stopped. Victims of the peanut recall are not only the poor unfortunate souls, families and pets who ate the tainted stuff; but the businesses who are losing millions in sales of perfectly good products.
Traditional Response Fell on Deaf Ears - While Hysteria Grew
As the fear of peanuts, peanut paste and peanut butter spread in that first few weeks, no onefrom the food industry proactively reached out to consumers online. If they did, I didn't see it.
Oh, sure, there were press releases announcing that products were safe, but unless you were subscribing via RSS to certain key phrases, they were falling on relatively deaf ears - as evidenced by the falling sales of peanut butter products of all kinds.
Apparently the food industry (and those who represent them) are glacially slow in their platforms and processes; and were unable to react to the needs of consumers and deliver information in the right channels of communication.
Meanwhile, Online... People Reached Out to Help..."
Yet...what I also find interesting is that the US GOVERNMENT seized the moment during this crisis to launch a social media collaboration...
The CDC joined together in a unique, interagency collaboration with US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and FDA to use interactive and social media to enhance the response to the the recent Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak and associated recalls of peanut containing products. You can read more about their efforts in the CDC Director's Blog Health Marketing Musings from Jay M. Bernhardt, PhD, MPH: Social Media Marketing on Salmonella Typhimurium.
Jay writes "Even as CDC is using well-established, traditional public health channels to disseminate critical information, we also are lunching cutting-edge, audience-centered tools to reach the public directly... Some products created for this response include podcasts, widgets, mobile-accessible content at mcdc.gov, Twitter..."
You can visit the Social Media Collaboration page or follow the two twitter feeds: FDA recalls or CDC Emergency.
WOW! Government actively using and exploring social media, twitter and the like, before private business...
Who would have thunk...
Attention industry and marketers alike...are you ready?