If your Easter weekend was not all it was cracked up to be spare a thought for the social media team at Cadbury.
They spent the extended weekend painstakingly replying to everyone who complained about the supposed removal of the word ‘Easter’ from its chocolate egg packaging.
A tabloid newspaper had initially reported last week that Cadbury was among a number of chocolate firms to ‘ban’ any reference to Easter on its seasonal products.
And once the Easter Bunny had made its deliveries the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts went into meltdown with complaints from some seriously irked customers.
Cadbury took the decision to try to reply to all of the disgruntled tweeters – a commendable act in any crisis or reputational management situation and one which is designed to stem the flow of complaints.
However their responses were very robotic with a few clearly approved ‘lines to take’ used repeatedly, together with the odd smiley face symbol.
If you take a look at its Twitter feed from the weekend you will see these phrases appear over and over again:
“We haven’t removed the word ‘Easter’ from our products, it’s on the back!”
“There’s no policy to remove the word ‘Easter’ it’s still on the back! You’ll always find Cadbury eggs at Easter time”
“The word ‘Easter’ is still mentioned on the back of our eggs. As a seasonal treat they’ll always be linked with Easter.”
Replying to what is essentially the same complaint over and over again is pretty turgid. But do you really want that to come across in your responses?
The replies look like they have been copied and pasted and in truth it does not give the company the human voice it should have been searching for. In fact, repeatedly telling people Easter was ‘on the back’ resulted in further online mockery.
It is a difficult balancing act when you are in this type of situation, but Cadbury could certainly have benefited from a wider range of replies at the very least – they would have had time to prepare them after the initial newspaper story.
It may also have looked at carrying a statement with a fuller response on its website which it could link to in some of its tweets.
But ultimately it would have benefitted from its social media team being given the freedom and flexibility to respond more individually, with a less corporate tone, and inject some personality and even humour into its responses.
That may sound risky but there are many examples of this approach paying off for companies by stopping tweetstorms in their tracks, such as O2 when it experienced widespread network problems And often it has the added benefit of turning a negative situation into positive mainstream media coverage – sadly not something Cadbury can claim.
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