The principle we talked about in class was control. It seems to me that there is a fine line when it comes to control. A company wants to have control, but it is not possible to have complete control. One of the cases we talked about in class was about Marie Callender's. The company that owns this brand decided to have a dinner, and invite top food and mom bloggers to attend. The invitation made it seem like a top chef was going to be cooking their meals. The plan was to serve Marie Callender's lasagna as the main dish, and see what their reaction was. Many of the bloggers got upset, because they had special dietary needs that were ignored. After the dinner the bloggers went and blogged about their experience. That is when ConAgra lost control, because they have no control over what they post on their blogs.
The article I found, was about McDonald's and how there newest twitter campaign went all wrong. They wanted to engage with their customers, so they created to hash-tags for customers to tweet with. McDonald's wanted people to talk about the good experiences they had at the restaurants. Instead many customers started telling bad experiences they have had there, and all kinds of bad stories. When this started to happen they lost control of this campaign. It completely backfired on them. It is hard to keep control of this type of social media, because people can post whatever they want to.
This is a daunting thought when you think about it. In my opinion the ConAgra fiasco was something of a shot in the foot for them. Too many careless or should I say thoughtless errors were made. If they had possibly segmented their audience more to a specific type of blogger then it might have worked. Or if they had selected an entirely different audience of unsuspecting everyday people then maybe. But this was a recipe for losing control. I'm sure McDonalds got a dose of reality as well when they realized that not everyone has good things to say about them and people are not afraid to say so. Sometimes it seems companies think that engaging in any fashion is better than no engagement at all. And that's partially true. But I think there is still some definite need for aforethought on the part of these companies. Or they're in for a rude awakening.
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