Social Media Will Impact Your Business – Just Ask Rock Art Brewery
Normally, when a company has its legal office fire off a “cease and desist” letter, it expects compliance – especially if it is a billion-dollar corporation. However, the days of a quick hit of the “easy button” to keep your brand’s death grip on perceived intellectual property might be over, especially if you tweak the wrong tribe.
In mid-September, Hansen’s Beverage – a Corona, California-based beverage company – issued a simple legal missive to Rock Art Brewery of Morrisville, Vt. It wanted Rock Art Brewery to cease and desist the use of its “Vermonster” beer product label, as well as any effort to trademark the name nationally. You see, Hansen’s owns the Monster energy drink brand and, of course, there’d be a lot confusion between the two products:
Did you, uh, sense my dripping sarcasm? It seems pretty obvious that the two products appear to be visually quite different. So you can imagine Rock Art brewer and co-owner Matt Nadeau’s surprise when his legal adviser told him, “Not so fast.” Those unfamiliar with trademark and intellectual property law were as stunned as Nadeau was when he learned that Hansen’s could drain him in court – even though he was absolutely not infringing on their trademark. The legal advice to Nadeau: Get a new name for Vermonster and keep your business.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to Vermonster changing its name: Nadeau said no. The word “no” and some resilience lead to conversations with customers, which led to a forum post on BeerAdvocate, a community of passionate if not zealous beer aficionados. Forum posts led to Twitter posts. Twitter posts lead to #hashtags. Soon, a Facebook Group page was started by an upset fan and supporter of the Rock Art Brewery. Fans and supporters of Rock Art took to emailing Hansen’s and posting messages and pictures on the Monster Energy Drink Facebook fan page.
While the Rock Art Brewery community was rallying on various social networks, Matt worked on a video with Green River Pictures to tell his story of why he was not willing to just give in. Since that video posted to YouTube on Oct.14th, it has been viewed over 75,000 times. All of the social media attention aroused interest from the local newspaper and on Vermont television. This combination of noise began to put enormous pressure on the folks at Hansen’s Beverage, who were refusing to give ground on the issue based on the notion that they might someday get into the business of selling beer.
That all changed when an investor in Hansen’s Beverage contacted Nadeau wanting to get right to the source. Nadeau spoke with the investor and simply asked to speak to the CEO of Hansen’s with the intention of coming to a reasonable conclusion. What exactly sparked that investor call is unknown, but it certainly was fostered by the combination of community activism creating momentum and interest from established newsprint, TV and radio outlets. That call with Hansen’s CEO was arranged and the two sides began to work out a mutually agreeable solution. At the end of the day, both sides were able to come to a solution outside of a court, likely much to the chagrin of a lawyer or several thousand.
So what should you take away from all of this? First, communities are powerful and highly engaged when presented with a passionate cause. Given the proper tools (which with modern technology are easily accessible) they will demand and expect a reasonable explanation and solution. We also see that those horribly pigeonholed traditional media are not so dead, after all. In fact, this story provides an excellent example of how new media and established media converge to make a complete impact. The social media flurry is not unimportant, but social media being plugged into established local media in Vermont will reach the interest level of larger news institutions such as the AP, The Boston Globe and The New York Times. That is what collectively pushed the story into the realm of something Hansen’s had to address head on.
Other take aways? Well, for starters, social networks are a serious place and if you are going to be there as a company, you really need to consider why you are there and who is speaking for you. In this case, as the conversation came to Monster Energy Drink’s Facebook fan page, a fairly significant conversational faux pas occurred. There was a flurry of dissatisfaction being posted on that page, but one of the earliest posts was met with the comment from the page administrator: “Nobody cares, get a life.” 
To be fair to the folks at Monster, and the individual responsible for posting and deleting that comment, nothing could have prepared them for what they faced in the last couple of weeks.
Here’s a “must” inclusion in the social networking handbook for brands: Listen first and then think twice before responding. Over at the Radian6 blog, Lauren had a very good post on how to handle negative comments recently. She follows that up with another interesting look regarding how to sort out responding to brand mentions in the social space.
There are several ways that the negative comments being posted to the Monster Energy Drink fan page and on Twitter could have been handled. I dare say we have a great tool to facilitate that discussion, and to arrive at strategies for not only how to manage your brand in the social space, but also to address these unanticipated events in a proactive and “social” manner. Don’t wait for the problem to come knocking at your door via a well-intentioned fan page or Twitter account meant for simple customer engagement. You need to be equally prepared to address the conversation that happens away from your community space. A well-informed and engaged community manager at Monster or Hansen’s with his ear to the ground should have been able to pick up on the storm that was brewing (pun intended) at BeerAdvocate. At worst, they could have been asking internally whether legal had this right much earlier in the timeline.
