Netflix Teaches a Valuable Lesson in Social Media Marketing

If you are a successful online movie streaming service with a DVD rental wing, are facing incredible pressures from competition and changing technologies and need to increase your prices and differentiate your service then it’s only natural that you will be using social media marketing with every breath, right? Well, umm…maybe not. This is a lesson Netflix simply forgot to take into account says online strategist David Amerland.

When Netflix decided to change its name to Qwikster not only did it lay itself open to just about every joke you can imagine concerning the company’s literacy but it also, it seems, forgot to trademark the name and did not check to see if the name was available in social media. The result of the oversight is nothing less than disastrous. Qwikster, is a handle already owned by a Twitter user who has a joint-smoking Elmo (the Sesame Street character) as his avatar. The account belongs to a student by the name of Jason Castillo, whose Tweets around recreational drugs, sex, games and music have a surreal, hypnotic quality all of their own and are a world apart from the mundane concerns surrounding the renting of DVDs or the streaming of movies.

Without a trademark on the name and with Jason Castillo actively posting, Twitter can do nothing to make him close his account or hand it over. Amusement aside, this illustrates first, that even a company like Netflix, which in many ways ‘gets’ the web, has not yet made social media marketing part of its DNA. Second, that the moment you take your eye off the ball and forget that we live in an age where social media is pervasive and capable of creating a massive boost or being an unforeseen hurdle, that’s when you are most likely to stumble.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO recently had to use Google’s social network, Google+ to apologize to Netflix users for the rise in Netflix prices and also explain why it was necessary and why the company had no option but to do it. He also posted an apologetic note on the Netflix blog. His opening confessional tone aside, it is clear that had there actually been thought put into social media as a valid means of communication from the very beginning, Netflix would now not be in hot water with its users nor would it be the butt of jokes concerning the pot-smoking Elmo’s Tweets.

Here are some lessons taught by Netflix’ social marketing faux pas:

1. Use the social media channel correctly. Social media is a communication channel first and foremost. Marketing on it is incidental and incremental, requiring a lot of effort for relatively little appreciable return. Communication however is instant.

2. Make communication with your public a core activity. Do not treat social media communication as something you bolt on as an afterthought. Social media is about creating transparency and a two-way conversation. Try to use it as a new form of Press Release and it is likely to explode in your face.

3. Create a dialogue. Does any company have a 100% grasp on its customers? They all work with a marketing persona in mind, yes they all have a certain demographic profile they operate with and yes, again, every company has some idea of the age-range and income of its core customers, but all of these figures make sense only when viewed from a distance. You’d be pressed to find a single person who precisely fits any demographic, marketing persona or even age-range income combination (though, it has to be said the latter is usually the ones which come closer because of their built-in imprecision). To suddenly have the ability to really talk to customers on a daily basis about what they like and dislike concerning your products and services is something which last century we could only dream about.

4. Be enthusiastic. Communicating like there is a gun being held to your head hardly makes for successful online communication in any channel. This is the real-time web! There are great opportunities to utilize social media correctly. Do it like you really care.

5. Respond to feedback. There is no point in saying you are listening if your behavior shows you are prepared to do nothing about it. You have to show what you are prepared to do and why when you take no action that is the right thing to do.

6. Show you are human. You may be corporate. You might be a one-man operation. You might, even, be part of a large conglomerate worth over $7 billion a year. If you are not prepared to put a human face to your communications, admit mistakes, explain faults and give well-reasoned arguments for everything, the only thing you’ll do is manage to alienate your customers.

Social media is still new. Communicating with customers is not. However, the latter has always been governed by what has been possible to communicate through the channels. We should expect many more mistakes to be made in the near future but as we learn from each one, the excuses for us getting our social media strategy wrong will at some point begin to wear a little thin.