“What’s so exciting about extending our eGifitng platform to Twitter is the open and real time nature of the platform. Tweet-a-coffee allows us to do something quite different in eGifting in that people can now give the gift of Starbucks to anyone on Twitter in the moment. Loyalty Program: Starbucks Rewards gives you free cups of coffee, free in-store refills, member events and offers, and the ability to earn two stars for every $1 you spend. You can also earn more stars by entering codes found inside specially marked retail items you buy in grocery stores.
As Medium put it, some businesses are made for social media. And Starbucks is definitely one of them. It seems like the minute social media became “the new thing”, Starbucks was all over it with its bright cups, and pretty coffee foam, and hipster Instagram filters. Seems like the whole fashion of Instagramming coffee is Starbuck’s fault even, though there’s no proof for it. How did this happen? How come we not only see their coffee shops on every street, but also on every second Facebook account?
Starbucks Stats in 2017
Twitter (11.9M followers)
Facebook (36.7M likes)
Instagram (15.7M followers)
Google+ (4.9M followers)
Pinterest (302.4K followers)
YouTube (145.5K subscribers)
The short answer is that it’s because they’re experimenting with social media marketing campaigns all the time. Sometimes the experiments go well, and surely sometimes they don’t. But because they’ve done so many, we can choose the best ones and the worst ones and drive some conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. After all it’s Starbucks - they’ve got the budget to play big. Most of us don’t - we’ve got to learn from someone else’s successes and failures. Let’s get to it.
Best Starbucks marketing campaigns:
1. Jumping on the trend
The first campaign that we’ll talk about (that actually happened in 2013) is for everyone who’s bracing themselves for you know what.
It took a blizzard to hit America for Starbucks to come up with a social media campaign that celebrates warm coffee in winter. The company exploded with Facebook and Twitter posts surrounding conversations around the snow storm, nicknamed Nemo. Nothing extraordinary - just the images of people in the cold weather holding warm cups of coffee. These were promoted with Facebook Ads and Promoted Tweets, meaning they appeared when people searched for weather-related hashtags such as #Nemo or #blizzard.
It’s the kind of jumping on the trend, real-time advertising that should be happening more often.
2. #theredcupcontest
Starbucks red cups became a tradition, the ultimate sign that Christmas is here, and sometimes even a reason for hype and controversy. Seemed like there’s no reason to take the matter further and involve social media marketing into the matter, but Starbucks did that anyway. In 2014 and 2015 they’ve introduced a holiday #redcupcontest on Instagram. The users had to share and tag photos of their red cups for a chance to win one of five prizes, and of course to include the #redcupcontest hashtag. In 2015 a photo was shared every 14 seconds on Instagram in the first two days, gathering a total of 40,000 entries over the course of the contest.
How did the contest become so successful? Firstly, people love taking photos of food and drinks as it is, and another excuse to do that won’t go unnoticed. Customer-generated content is the key to a successful social media campaign, and when it’s coupled with the overall holiday excitement, it works even better. Customers got used to the fact that the closer the holiday, the more brands try to advertise their products and make them buy anything. A good-hearted holiday-themed contest looks much more attractive.
3. Tweet-a-coffee
'Tweet-a-Coffee’ campaign let people give a $5 gift card to a friend just by putting both ‘@tweetacoffee’ and a friend's handle in a tweet. The coffee was obviously not free, so the users had to link their Starbucks account to Twitter (and create one in the first place if they didn’t have one before!) and their credit card to the account.
In two months, more than 27,000 users had tweeted a coffee. It was calculated that the promotion brought around $180,000 worth of coffee. Not only that, but Starbucks got the info, such as Twitter handles, for thousands of coffee-lovers!
4. Charity Campaign
Combining charity, customer engagement, and collaboration with another social media platform is the definition of taking things a step further. If you want to know how to pull that off, turn to Starbucks. Once upon a time, the company teamed up with Foursquare, a local search-and-discovery service mobile app, to help spread awareness about AIDS. For a short period of time, Starbucks donated $1 every time someone checked into one of its coffeehouses in the US and Canada. Starbucks set a limit of $250,000 on its donation during this campaign. Before that they’ve donated $10m to the RED charity’s fight against AIDS.
5. Meet me at Starbucks
Starbucks Twitter Followers
And once again about user-generated content, this time in the form of text.
Starbucks is surely a great place for first dates, second dates, meetups with friends, and even lunches with strangers. Knowing that, the company launched the “Meet Me at Starbucks” social media campaign in 2014. Starbucks gave their customers the chance to win free coffee for a year in exchange for their “How We Met” story. For the whole year! You can imagine the level of response to that. The #HowWeMet hashtag was used to spread the contest and let people read each other’s engaging stories. The campaign was introduced worldwide, so people got to read the most exciting stories and see Starbucks from the whole new angle.
Worst Starbucks marketing campaigns
As noted before, you can’t carry out dozens of experimental social media marketing campaigns and not fail a couple of times. But the good thing is, knowing what not to do is often at least as important as knowing what to do. So let’s have a look.
1. #RaceTogether
Perhaps the most scandalous Starbucks marketing campaign, Race Together, started with the CEO Howard Schultz pointing out the importance of the conversation that should surround race issues. That ended up in the initiative of evoking the conversation with the Starbucks barista. Each cup had the #Racetogether written on it to encourage customers to talk about these issues with the barista. The idea seemed noble, however blindly stupid. If you’re a customer, you probably don’t have the time or the motivation to discuss 400 years of oppression while paying for your latte. If you’re a barista, you’re in the same situation just you’re making the latte. And there’s a line behind you, and it’s 8 am. I mean… What were they thinking?
The campaign hit a backlash on social media and was terminated in six days.
2. #SpreadTheCheer
The #SpreadTheCheer social media campaign was introduced in time for Christmas. All it called for was to spread cheerful holiday messages to everyone. As it happens with Starbucks, they went a bit further than your usual Twitter campaign would go - they broadcasted #SpreadTheCheer tweets live on the wall of the ice rink at the National History Museum. It was part of the deal for sponsoring an event at the Museum.
Unfortunately, the timing was absolutely off. They’ve introduced the campaign after they had cut wages for some employees and apparently had not been paying the corporation tax in England in full. So you can see how the thing could’ve backfired. In short, the hashtag was hijacked by angry users and used to confront the company on taxes, maternal leave, wages and what not.
What’s there to learn from this experience? Don’t introduce innocent cheerful campaigns after going through a scandal. Give people some time to forget. And probably reconsider the live tweet broadcast. It’s ridiculously risky with Twitter.
Overall, it’s clear that Starbucks has more positive campaigns than negative ones. This, of course, was not the whole list. Much more successes have happened in the Starbucks social media history, while most campaigns are rather neutral and hard to analyze without access to the sales/stats/info. What is clear though, is that if you experiment like Starbucks, you mostly win.
What’s your experience with social media campaigns? What's your social media strategy? Are you looking for new ways to entertain and attract your audience, or use the old proven ones? Let me know in the comments.
Copywriter at Awario
description */ ?>-->The Groundswell Effect Part I
Introduction
This article kicks off a three part series entitled The Groundswell Effect. This series is based upon the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed By Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. While making my way through this book I walked away with three important concepts, each one will be addressed in a separate article:
1. The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts
2. A brand is dictated by customers not by an individual or company
3. Relationships are key
Part I will address what exactly a groundswell is, identify the changing rules of the game that we each take part in, and in doing so reinforce the first concept of the whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts.
What is a Groundswell?
Groundswell was a term originally coined by Forrester Research in a 2006 report titled Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What To Do About It. According to the Groundswell authors “the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.” Simply put, in the past if I had a question concerning the quality or usefulness of a particular product or service I would go to the company offering said product or service. Most recently though, if I had these same questions I would go online and read things such as blogs, customer reviews, discussion boards, wikis, etc. and not even go to the company. The groundswell is the gathering of individuals and their interactions in these online communities which is essentially the Internet as we understand it.
The Rules Are Changing
This new dynamic is essentially changing the rules by which the free market game is played. In the past a company controlled communications regarding a product or service by being selective or limiting the amount of information released to the public about said product or service. The concept of the groundswell shifts the power away from the manufacturer or service provider to the user community. Manufacturers and service providers are realizing this is occurring whether they like it or not and are attempting to adapt by participating in the groundswell and as a result have a stake in shaping the communities perception of their product or service.
The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of It’s Individual Parts
As a result of my engineering background I have known this concept to be true for years but mainly in a high technology system context. Consider your car, although the individual parts such as the brakes, engine, onboard computer, etc. may be complex, powerful, and add value it their own right, it isn’t until they are combined into a complete functioning vehicle that their true power and value is unleashed. The whole vehicle is much greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Now consider this concept in a marketing and crowd behavior sense, which is the context of groundswells. Simply stated, an immediate assumption is that one person + one person = two people or 1 + 1 = 2. However two people working together is a much more powerful force than the two people working in isolation as individuals. Interestingly enough, the more people you add to the mix the more powerful the effect becomes – this is the essence of the whole being greater than the sum of it’s individual parts. Anyone who has ever worked in both an individual and a partnership situation knows this to be true.
Personal Reflection
In my experience I have found what the authors are saying to be true. Word of mouth is generally the biggest item to convince me to try something, especially when it comes from a friend or group with similar tastes. The web makes retrieving this information extremely easy, nearly instantaneous. As mentioned in my Consistency and Exclusivity post I tend to gravitate towards certain brands and stick with them over time.
Pockets of information form around these brands through groupings of user communities, this is certainly the case with brands such as Apple. If I am to purchase a brand, product, or service that I am unfamiliar with I almost always check online to find quality information about the expected purchase which is generally at my fingertips. Personally, the only meaningful contact I have with a company is at the point of sale where my opinion has already been formed through groundswelling. Another example is Starbucks, where this company actually formed it’s own individual Facebook and Twitter to tap into the power of the groundswell. For your convenience I have provided links both the Starbucks Facebook Page and the Starbucks Twitter Page as examples. For more on the role of Social Media in business development refer to my past articles titled Social Media Parts I, II, and III.
From a personal context consider the effect this has on your purchasing decisions. Personally, it is true that I am interested in nice ads and marketing campaigns that attract my attention based upon my interests. However, I am much more interested in online user reviews as opposed to industry experts and critics and most interested in friends and colleagues with similar taste. To finalize this point consider the impact an opinion a friend with similar taste and interests has on your decision making, now take it to the next level and consider the impact an online user community demonstrating trends concerning a product or service prior to your purchase and you will understand the power of the groundswell.
To Be Continued…
In Part II I will discuss why a brand is dictated by the groundswell and not the company offering the product or service.
The power of the collective groundswell is much higher than that of an individual!
–John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding
Starbucks Twitter Handle
December 29, 2008 at 7:00 pm3 comments