I’ve been looking for examples of great storytelling in social media. There aren’t an abundance, it seems. I’ve asked some other, more prominent social media junkies, who haven’t been able to come up with much, either. I can point to Tom Martin’s excellent Mardi Gras Twitter experiment. And Danny Brown pointed me to this great story about Smith Family Farm. Personally, I think pure brand storytelling is one of the most underutilized social strategies.
It’s just one form of storytelling, but why don’t more brands share photos, videos, anecdotes, lifestreams, to give us an inside glimpse of what makes them tick, their cultures, their values? What better way to make a personal connection? Maybe because their cultures aren’t as engaging as they could be in the first place? : )
Zappos does a great job of this, generally. Their storytelling reflects one of their core values: create fun and a little weirdness.
When I first started on Twitter I saw a photo that @zapposCEO shared of the coffee machine in one of their buldings that has been rigged to look like Rosie on the Jetsons. It made an impression: “Fun, intelligent brand.”
Last week, in doing some research for a presentation, I also came across this more recent video of a prank that employees there were playing on each other, involving dropping a bunch of ping pong balls on other employees’ heads. Funny, sort of. But stupid funny. It, too, made an impression: “Are they paying any attention to my order?”
So I did more digging and learned from a great post from ReadWriteWeb that the Zappos site aggregates the tweets from all of the Zappos employees on Twitter. As the post pointed out, there are no tweets that say “drunk”; however, at the time I first viewed the aggregation, the first tweet in the stream was something about how too much Jagermeister was going to make for a bad morning the next day. This, I believe, definitely falls in the “TMI” category. But I also understand that it’s an isolated tweet, and that overall the stream sends a positive message. It’s more “real” because of the imperfections and the fact that its not scrubbed corporate clean. They also aggregate non-employees’ tweets about Zappos – positive and negative – which takes serious guts and I applaud.
I’m a big fan of leaning towards more transparency. I’m not suggesting that employees should be heavily “censored” or edited. But even if you let the silly pranks fly, wouldn’t it be OK to simply ask employees to not tweet about drinking? As far as social media policies go, “Don’t tweet about getting wasted” seems pretty lenient. What is “fun” and what is “stupid fun” is highly subjective. Jagermeister is…Jagermeister. Don’t you want to be seen as fun AND professional and trustworthy?
My point? This type of transparent storytelling, while a great strategy, walks a fine line between “fun” and “too much fun, not enough business.” Quite honestly, I’m usually the first one saying that people take themselves too seriously; but I do think Zappos could create stories that better reinforce their brand of great customer service. There’s a difference between storytelling and strategic storytelling. I’m excited to see what Zappos will do next now that Mullen is their agency.
Have you seen any great social storytelling? When do you think social storytelling goes too far? Where’s the line?
Photo credits: Rosie from DYN on Flickr.
“Are they paying any attention to my order?”…Have you placed an order? In my experience, they are not only paying attention to my order, Zappos pays great attention to my order. Packed correctly and nicely, shipped fast, and received within hours after placing it!
Please see:
http://www.spaighttalk.com/brand-behaving-badly-stop-pretending-to-be-a-happy-customer/
Sue,
Love your distinction between storytelling and strategic storytelling. As I noted in my Twitter experiment write-up, the point wasn’t just to expose people to Mardi Gras it was to do so with a distinct editorial focus: family friendly fun… and we filtered everything we did through that lens. Hope you’ll follow along this year when we do it again… but bigger.
@TomMartin
I’m employed at Zappos thru a temp agency and I hope to become a full fledged member of the Zappos family. I’ve ordered a few items from Zappos and have gotten nothing but the quickest, most courteous treatment. It is a lot of fun working here and we get kudos and special treats quite frequently and we are thanked EVERY day for our hard work. I wish ping pong balls would’ve fallen on me, cuz I’m into “stupid funny” stuff. I love Zappos and I’m proud to be with the family here. I like fun and a little (a lot actually!!)weirdness!
Lana,
Thanks for your comment. I think it’s very cool that Zappos’ culture inspires such loyalty among its employees. I’m sure that helps inspire you all to deliver better service and I’m glad that you have personally received good service from the company for which you work.
Different strokes for different folks, as they say. Maybe everyone else in the world thinks the ping pong ball thing was hilarious and cool, I don’t know. This is of course just my personal opinion and feelings about it.
And maybe I’m an anomaly in thinking that it doesn’t make sense for you guys to tweet about Jagermeister. I’m sorry, but I think there is such as thing as TMI when it comes to how much your customers and potential customers see. Like it or not everything each individual does shapes each external individual’s perceptions in myriad ways.
If I was in charge, I would say there should be a filter. Put anything that doesn’t reflect well to a prospect on Yammer, internally, so it can still feed the internal passion. But, I’m obviously not in charge, and Tony and Rob and the rest are doing a phenomenal job. Most companies would kill for a culture as strong as yours.
I hope you do get to become a “full fledged member of the Zappos family.”
Sincerely, Sue
[...] couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about Zappos’ social storytelling and how sometimes, I think it goes too far. An employee at Zappos posted a comment on the blog [...]