As most marketers know by now, this week was a rough one for The Gap as their rebranding efforts were met with a lot of negativity by customers, fans, and marketers alike. The Gap does not stand alone in suffering the lash back of the social web. They now join the ranks of major brands such as Motrin, Tropicana, and Walmart in learning too late that customers and pundits are paying attention and are sharing their viewpoints.

When I say ‘what were they thinking’ I mean that I would truly like to get inside the heads of the marketing decisions makers to understand their thought processes. Or, better yet, to be a fly on the wall to see the social dynamics of the meetings that take place and steer decisions that are made.

Every day my natural marketing curiosity makes me wonder why marketers are not insightful enough to foresee the results of their actions often to the point of detriment where they are in a position of surprise or defense.  The opposite also intrigues me. I am always impressed with marketers that have well thought-out plans that are executed flawlessly and with confidence. Undoubtedly, I think we can and should learn from both.

1. Harvard Business Review: The Gap Logo Debacle: A Half-Brained Mistake

“And now, recognizing the error of its ways, the Gap has decided to get radically open: to let anyone compete to design their logo, via (you guessed it) markets, networks, and communities — which is the way that 90% of design, business, and downright everything should be done in the first place”

2. SMI: Social Media Screw Ups – A History

A lot of examples of lessons learned…the hard and expensive way.

3. Social Media Explorer: Ford One-Ups Itself With Global Focus Launch

“What Ford is doing is yet another trump card to out-do the last awesome thing they did. With the Fiesta Movement and Facebook-centric launch of the Explorer, Ford created a new way of communicating with its customers and showed the world how to do social media on scale. Nothing is ever perfect, but they were both successes.”

4. Smart Blog on Social Media: How Cisco defines business-to-business social-media success … and achieves it

“Success for each program varies based on the objectives that were set at the start of the effort. To help our teams identify what to measure, we have recently put together a Social Media Measurement Framework that outlines some of the most common objectives we have for a social-media campaign and defines the data points within those objectives that we want to measure. This framework also helps to ensure that our teams are consistently measuring the same things so we can compare, apples to apples, across our initiatives.”

Happy Reading!

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
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• Is Personal Social Media Experience A Negative For Job Seekers?
• For Hire! Searching for My Next Career Opportunity

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