June 13th, 2009
Guest Post: Social Media Analysis for the Brave New Film’s Stop Starbucks Campaign
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(This guest post is written by Freddie Benjamin (Twitter).)
On May 20, 2009 Brave New Films (BNF) – the media firm behind Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price – stretched the limits of digital activism as it declared war on Starbucks. Its battle cry: “Twitter bombs away!”
Twitter turned into a battleground when media campaigns from BNF and Starbucks collided on the same day. Brave New Film’s newest project “Stop Starbucks” is aimed at raising awareness of Starbucks’ anti-union position and its murky past in dealing with union employees. It was a co-incidence that its YouTube launch coincided with Starbucks’ ad campaign asking people to take pictures of Starbucks posters in six major cities across the US and post them on Twitter. The very next day a post on Brave New Film’s blog urged people to take pictures of themselves in front of a Starbucks holding signs protesting Starbucks’ anti-union stance and to post them to twitter – and hence started an ‘anti-campaign’. The stand-out feature that turned this affair into a twitter-war was BNF urging people to use the same hashtags (#top3percent and #starbucks) that Starbucks had decided upon for its promotional campaign.
However opportunistic and unruly the move was, there is little to show for the success of BNF’s anti-campaign. Messages tagged with #top3percent peaked on May 19 – the day Starbucks began its twitter campaign. Only 2 messages bore the tag the next day when BNF launched its attack. After that there was no serious activity for the hashtag.
Looking at numbers for #starbucks tells the same story. Activity spiked on May 19 and fell on May 20. Though the number of messages with #starbucks rose again on May 21 none of them had #top3percent and only 8 out of 32 had it on May 22. Only 14% of messages on May 21 and 22 could have been from BNF supporters protesting against Starbucks.
The failure of the anti-campaign can be seen through the trend in follower growth for the two warring twitter accounts. While @starbucks ( 200K+ followers) has maintained a steady growth rate, @StopStarbucks (400+ followers) has not been able to grow at all – and peculiarly it does not show any activity before June 12!
While number of followers solely might not be the best metric to determine the success or failure of a twitter account meant to connect with the consumer, it provides important preliminary insight into what one could expect. A Twitalyzer analysis of @starbucks versus @StopStarbucks gives clear indication that twitter bombs dropped by the Stop Starbucks campaign were ineffective.
The Influence score – a composite of the number of followers, retweets, tweet frequency and references – is well established at above 50% for @starbucks while @StopStarbucks is struggling with a score of 0.5%. While one could argue that StopStarbucks is a new account, a closer look at the influence growth for @starbucks shows that it has comfortably maintained its influence level of 50%+ before and after the twitter attack was launched.
Also, the Starbucks brand is strongly positioned in twitter – thanks to its active social media participation. A brand strength (the likelihood that a brand is being discussed on twitter) of 100 is appropriately described as mind-boggling by Twitanalyzer.
It’s not only twitter where Starbucks ranks high in terms of brand strength. Starbucks is one of the strongest brands performing highly on consumer favorability. It is a major part of American culture. (Check out GoRemy’s latest video). Attacking Starbucks was always going to be a challenging task.
The Stop Starbucks campaign has made Howard Schultz – CEO of Starbucks – its main target. The website has a letter addressed to Mr. Schultz asking him to change his stance on labor union. The blog post that initiated the twitter attack offered examples of placards that were aimed at Mr. Schultz such as “Thanks a latte for nothing, Mr. Schultz,” or “Schultz makes millions, workers make beans”. In effect, the campaign looks and sounds as if it were more of a Howard Schultz defamation crusade rather than something done to raise awareness of a social issue.
Twitter is well suited as a platform where millions could be made aware of various issues via well organized campaigns. The BNF anti-campaign shows that it is important what kind of a ‘tone’ and approach such campaigns take. A tone or approach in the range of aggressive to hostile could put off majority of twitter users especially if the targeted object is well liked among them. Online consumer sentiment for Starbucks among microblogs, as measured by social mention, is highly positive. Starbucks’ current sentiment ratio is 5:1, meaning 5 positive mentions to each 1 negative mention. A month ago it was 4:1. It has actually risen during BNF’s twitter attack.
The Stop Starbucks campaign carried through with the radical idea of hijacking twitter hashtags and started their own contest. People were once again urged to post pictures of themselves holding placards on twitter. This time they were instructed to “include the following: #TWISI #starbucks @starbucks… It’s important to include these in your post as it will appear in Twitter searches.” The Facebook photo page for the campaign so far shows only 6 pictures that have been posted and the contest has ended.
Starbucks is facing new challenges in the face of recession. The firm has adapted to its changing environment and heavily invested in social media marketing as can be seen from its Facebook page which ranks 27th overall in PageData’s statistics as of June 13, 2009. The Stop Starbucks Facebook Page however lags well behind Starbucks with only 546 fans compared to more than 2 million that Starbucks has. Brave New Films is not new to social media either. However, it seems that their little experiment of aggressive marketing did not reap much reward. BNF has an excellently managed YouTube channel which could be better leveraged for marketing purposes. At the same time a more appropriate strategy for twitter could be adopted to exploit the potential there.
