Corner Office | By Deborah L. Cohen
Reining Them In
With social media providing operators and employees an easy path to embarrassing a brand, corporate teams need to establish online law.
In the past year, quick serves ranging from McDonald’s to Qdoba Mexican Grill to Wing Zone, as well as smaller chains and independents, have raced to cash in on the marketing benefits of the social-media craze, stepping up activity on networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
But in addition to the virtual presence established by parent companies, aggressive franchisees are taking it upon themselves to create their own pages on Web sites in an attempt to cultivate customer loyalty and promote local offers. Even individual employees have jumped into the fray, often identifying their affiliation to a particular brand on their personal pages.
All of this activity—much of it unfettered—is causing a lot of headaches and wrangling behind the scenes in the offices of attorneys, marketing professionals, and others responsible for maintaining a consistent company message and preventing liability. They are struggling to put some structure around these new forms of real-time communication.
“It’s something we want to participate in, but we want to understand it, do it effectively, and do it right,” says Victoria Blackwell, general counsel for Papa Murphy’s, a chain of more than 1,100 pizzerias based in Vancouver, Washington. “The difficulty for us is balancing the brand recognition and integrity with this fast-moving media source that is so open ended.”
Unchecked activity can have disastrous results. Consider Domino’s Pizza, which in April faced a media nightmare after employees at a Conover, North Carolina, restaurant decided to film a prank replete with health code violations and post it on YouTube.
More typical are unintentional mistakes by operators such as misrepresented local offers. A promotion can become viral in minutes, says Blackwell, noting how fast social-media content travels across geographic areas. If a franchisee in Wichita, Kansas, for instance, neglects to specify that a discount sent out on a Twitter feed is good only at his restaurant, other operators could soon be facing an unexpected promotion.
“It happens so quickly, in a heartbeat, and it’s gone,” Blackwell says.
There are other promotional considerations to be dealt with as well, she notes, such as how to ensure that offers comply with state regulations regarding giveaways and sweepstakes. Then there are other legal worries like customer privacy issues or the potential fallout from engaging in a public discourse with an irate customer.
Experts agree there are no easy answers for keeping the virtual frontier in check. But they say dragging the corporate heels is not a viable option; with or without management support, operators are likely to push ahead.
According to Sam Fiorella, interactive strategist for Atlanta-based Denmark (The Agency), policy must be set early and disseminated to all of the company’s constituents, beginning with headquarters staff and extending throughout the franchise system. Fiorella’s firm has worked with McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and Ruby Tuesday, and helped some clients create in-house certification programs for those charged with developing social media.
“Create the strategy. Understand where your audience is online,” he says. “A good organization will create the plan and provide the tools to franchisees. Make sure that everybody understands what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.”
A frequent mistake is to create a presence on a public site and then neglect to stay current with attention-starved followers, says Nick Powills, founder of Decatur, Georgia–based No Limit Media, which specializes in social networking.
Powills, whose shop works with brands like Wing Zone and Toppers Pizza, says another bad move is to ignore negative reviews on forums such as Yelp!, where customers freely vent their likes and dislikes.
“Social media is never done,” he says, noting that customer service remains the name of the game. Some of the most loyal supporters of brands are one-time public complainers later given personal attention to address their grievances. “Franchisees don’t have the time; they have to focus on their own business.”
A good organization will create the plan and provide the tools to franchisees. Make sure that everybody understands what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.”
To get around the often-intense commitment required to maintain a virtual presence, Powills and his team have been handling development of both parent sites and those of their franchisees.
Other chains have installed in-house social media gurus to set policy and monitor activity. Doug Thielen, manager of nontraditional marketing and public relations for Qdoba, splits his time between developing the company’s corporate social-media presence and counseling its 70-plus franchise groups.
Qdoba has held conference calls, issuing periodic guidelines—including a library of potential promotional topics and tweets—and offering ad hoc one-on-ones with operators as needed. Topics covered include when to engage and how to maintain logo and brand standards.
“A lot of it is situational,” Thielen says. “We end up going through it together.”
Similar collaboration is taking place at Tasti D-Lite, the Franklin, Tennessee–based frozen-dessert chain. When franchisees come in for training, the company offers case studies and instruction in topics that include creating Facebook and Twitter pages, developing coupons, and avoiding social-media gaffes like the hard sell.
“We’re setting expectations from the very beginning,” says BJ Emerson, the chain’s director of information and social technologies. “We’re trying to empower them and walk along with them.”
Education also includes awareness of taboo topics such as online discussion of nutritional claims or financial details of a franchise agreement.
“I remain fairly conservative about what we talk about,” says Emerson, who frequently confers with the company’s legal department. “Most of it is just [keeping updated] with what people are saying about Tasti D-Lite.”
Kevin Hein, a franchise attorney at Faegre & Benson LLP in Denver, says that social-media policies will likely take a more formalized shape in the first quarter of 2010 when franchise operations manuals are set for annual updates.
“The franchisor who wants to control the brand in this space has to be ahead of the curve,” Hein says. “They have to be putting out policies to their franchisors to tell them how to use this, what the boundaries are.”
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Deborah Cohen is QSR’s former Finance reporter.
