When Social Juice Turns Sour: A Less Than Merry Holiday for Lowe’s
Lowe’s Home Improvement shot to the top of Media Logic's Retail Social Juice Index, breaking all kinds of records—for all the wrong reasons. In case you missed this story, say, because you’ve spent the week in a sensory deprivation tank, here’s the short of it. Lowe’s had purchased time and was running spots on a new TLC reality show titled “All-American Muslim.” This ad buy evidently generated a number of complaints, whipped up, it appears, by a relatively (previously) unknown conservative group called The Florida Family Association. According to most reports, Lowe’s pulled its ads in response to these complaints. This action generated a firestorm. Lowe’s RSJI score jumped 330 points to 391 on Tuesday, December 13. It jumped another 97 points on Wednesday, and then spiked a scary 469 points on Thursday, topping out at 896. (For comparison, the average RSJI number for 408 brands currently being scored by Media Logic was 46 on Thursday. The #2 brand on the Index, American Girl, scored 267. The previous record high score was 450, again by American Girl.) Lowe’s number is clearly exceptional. And in this case, it is exceptionally bad. The question is, can it teach us something?
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.
Marketers have been expending an enormous amount of energy reporting on and discussing social media marketing. News outlets, forums, blogs and associations devote a huge amount of time and space to the topic – and there is no shortage of “solutions” being offered to help companies get the most out of social media marketing. But have you noticed the tone is starting to get a little desperate? Does it feel like we are using fear tactics to get the point across? I have to ask: Have we created mass hysteria over the subject of social media?