GenXmanager: Leadership for the Generation X Manager

Social Media Score!

I took my wife and five year old daughter to New York to see the city in its Christmas spectacular best. During our travels I encountered one great social media score and one fail. Let me talk about the fail first.

Dylan’s Candy Bar

My wife and daughter wanted to go to Dylan’s Candy Bar which is quite an amazing retail operation. The place is three floors packed with sugary delight. The colors are vibrant. The employees are friendly and the atmosphere is pleasant; unless you are taking photos or video that is.

I pulled out my iPhone and was going to shoot a few photos and record some video. After which I was going to share on Facebook, tweet on Twitter, and load to YouTube. I snapped off a few pictures just before an employee came rushing over saying (rather politely), “I’m sorry sir but we don’t allow photos or video in the store.” I said, “okay” and put the phone away.

Talk about a lost marketing opportunity. I was about to tell hundreds of people how wonderful the store was and how cool it looked from the inside. Perhaps if a few of my Facebook friends and Twitter followers were planning to go to New York City they would add Dylan’s to their itinerary. As many of you reading this know, social media is a great tool for word of mouth marketing. Fail.

Compare this to the next example.

Charmin’s Enjoy the Go Restrooms

As we were walking in Time Square we see this storefront (not sure what else to call it). Outside was a guy with a toilet seat around his waist. The store read ‘Charmin’ with the tag line, “Enjoy the go”. As it so happened, my family had to “go” so we went inside. What we found was spectacular (even indescribable).

A pop-style song titled “enjoy the go” was playing loudly. There were about 25 restrooms which were cleaned by smiling, dancing, employees after each use. I never felt so happy about going to the bathroom. Imagine the Disney Store or FAO Schwarz but for bathrooms. After we were finished “going” we exited into an interactive area where you could do the “potty dance”, video record a “bathroom confessional”, and have your photo taken on a giant toilet (I’m not kidding about any of this). Here are a few photos (click to enlarge them).

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Enter social media. Charmin had computers that connected to Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. They encouraged you to share the experience with your friends. You could even take a photo with the Charmin-themed background for your Facebook profile. They had no problem with me taking photos. The staff even asked if I wanted a photo taken with my family. Of course I shared this experience with everyone…I couldn’t help it. This place was so innovative I had to share it. In true social media fashion, after I tweeted how awesome this place was @Enjoythego replied back saying, “@RonDesi Cody: So glad you like it #charminrestrooms.” Score. Big time score for Charmin.

There you have it. One social media fail and one social media score. How can your organization revamp to use social media? How can you encourage your customers to share how wonderful your product or service is? How can you make the experience so radically amazing they will want to share it enthusiastically with their hundreds of friends and followers? You want to score.