Why is Twitter doing so well?
“Let me tell you a story. The first thing I did here was to create some order and then I discovered that several channels had been claimed with similar names. One fan account stood out: it was well maintained and had many followers. Then I asked around and sent a direct message from my private account . Joli, as she is called, said: 'oh no, now I've been caught!'. That same evening we called each other and then I invited her to the office, because I thought it was really cool. That's why we immediately hired her as a Ben & Jerry's team member for webcare and since then we've been going really well.”
Small team for web care
Surprisingly, only a few people work on webcare and other online expressions of Ben & Jerry's. In addition to Stephan, there is another intern, Joli for Twitter, and Facebook is run by SocialEmbassy . For a brand that 'drives on telling stories to people', it is striking that a significant part of the dialogue takes place outside the home. Stephan explains in detail how they have invested a great deal of time (read: money) in the people who manage Facebook to teach them "what we are like as Ben & Jerry's. We truly represent the philosophy of Ben and Jerry online. Authentic answers, even if it is not from a person but a company with standards and values."
Now that the brand needs people who can do both the daily community management and understand everything about advertising and immediately translate the analytics into actions, it makes sense to hire specialists: “Internally, you don’t want to have all that knowledge in-house for just one brand. It’s better to hire expertise so that we can worry about what we want to say, and they can worry about how.” Moreover, there are only a few people who are allowed to work for Ben & Jerry’s: it’s not an account that is shared across the entire agency.
Why do you want to keep the team small?
“We work flexibly and quickly, partly due to a separate Facebook group and Twitter group on Whatsapp. We can answer eighty percent of the online questions immediately. If someone has a more difficult question, it is put in that group and then there is always someone who has a solution or responds, also on the weekend. That works fine for us and that is also due to the bizarre amount of hours we have invested in giving people the brand DNA. We pass the rest on to the offline Consumer Care Center.”
If you do everything online, how do you reach your influencers?
“We really enjoy surprising famous people who tweet about us with ice cream that we have delivered. But that's not a strategy, we just do it when we happen to read something nice. When we launched the new flavor ' Clever Cookies ', it was linked to a competition for young, sustainable entrepreneurs in Europe. So around that Clever Cookies campaign we also sent a lot of ice cream to people who we thought were clever cookies themselves. Everyone really likes that.
But only if we're already in contact and we think someone likes it, we do something like that. So I didn't make a list of most followed people, which would have been the easiest route."
“Sometimes we look at the entire online conversation with Sysomos russia mobile phone number list to see which way it is going. Internationally we use BuddyMedia , I discuss that with colleagues. This is apart from the tools that the agency uses, of course. Our starting point is that Facebook and Twitter are manned almost continuously, at least also on weekends.
But you also have the human factor, you can’t expect to get a response at 3am. Ben & Jerry sleep too! Joli is never in the office, she works on Twitter from her mobile everywhere and nowhere. My colleague and I in the office also do almost everything mobile. We post comments via the Facebook admin account from our smartphones.”
Webcare from Ben & Jerry's on the Dutch Facebook page, also for people without a profile picture.
Webcare from Ben & Jerry's on the Dutch Facebook page, also for people without a profile picture.
What role does the web care team play when a publicity crisis arises?
“If something really is wrong and it happens on a Saturday, there are escalation lines. A simple flowchart: For example, is it claimed that our product poses a risk to public health? Then we consult with departments such as Media Relations, Retail and Legal. A few months ago, Fair Trade Netherlands was under fire and that indirectly has to do with us. When I heard that on the news on a Saturday morning, I quickly contacted all those people and emailed colleagues. I make sure that the right people are on standby.”