Social-Media Pranksters Had Fun With Walmart's Caskets

And What We Can Learn From It About Monitoring Your Brand's Health

Posted by Craig Daitch on 11.05.09 @ 08:43 AM

Craig Daitch

When it comes to social media, it's best to start with a solid listening strategy. And while you're fine-tuning the "what, where, when and how" as you're eavesdropping on conversations around the social web, remember that while analysis can be assisted through technology, it's by no means a fully automated process.

Take, for example, the recent press release announcing that Walmart has begun selling caskets online. A bit odd, but as it was introduced with Halloween around the corner, the news caught on and was aggregated across the social web.

As the casket story grew, it began to trend on social news sites such as Reddit, and because Walmart empowers its consumers with the ability to rate, comment and share product reviews, a few clever folks started writing fictitious (yet highly entertaining) comments about the products on Walmart.com. The hilarity of the reviews began to border on the absurd.

Now say I'm a brand manager at Walmart and I'm analyzing social-media chatter and sentiment. At first glance, I would be pleasantly surprised when free products such as social-analysis tool Social Mention determined positive sentiment around the "Lady de Guadalupe Steel Casket" that Walmart is selling. And, given the vast number of reviews on the infinite products in Walmart's inventory, it may not become apparent immediately that the sentiment is indeed fake and facetious -- sometimes the Long Tail can sometimes work against you.

The example, funny as it is, serves as a reminder that your approach to social media monitoring should follow a similar approach to what SEM/SEO experts do. Use filtering to your advantage. Leverage tag clouds to determine what words are the strongest within a web page of content. If something looks fishy, dive deeper in your analysis. Also, if positive reviews don't match the number of sales, that too should raise a red flag.

It appears Walmart has taken down the faux reviews and its casket example deserves more accolades than criticism. Walmart implicitly trusts its consumers to both defend the brand as well as take a role in advocating what they like and dislike about the products they sell on their shelves.

But it serves as a reminder that every marketer needs to make sure it's not monitoring the social space myopically. The reports you see on your desk that present your brand's health in the social web is the first step to fully understanding what role your brand plays in the lives of your consumers.

8 Comments

By thoughts | Winter Garden, FL November 5, 2009 09:35:24 am:

We at http://www.thoughts.com like how Walmart trusted their customers and brand so much. This prank did not lessen customer's shopping at Walmart but mostly just gave everyone a good laugh.
However, people like to cause commotion and a reason why as a company, being on guard to protect it is always key.

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By francescowesel | Boston, MA November 5, 2009 10:33:24 am:

Thanks for the interesting article. The only issue is that even a "solid listening strategy" like the one of Walmart doesn't guarantee to measure what is really important- consumer engagement.

Information about kind of engagement can impossibly be derived from the field of web analytics. Only a deeper look into the mind of the consumer could reveal its content. Online engagement is usually driven by mixture of emotional states and rational beliefs, such as, in the case of positive engagement, sympathy, trust, pride, etc.

Users might have been active commenting and rating, but as mentioned only diving deeper into what language is used about the issue, how consumers express themselves (also on external blogs and social media) can reveal the true emotional connections with Walmart's efforts.

Francesco Wesel
Integrated Marketing Communication
www.francescowesel.com
www.brandnewtimes.blogspot.com

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By Kevin | New York, NY November 5, 2009 11:03:50 am:

I'm sure some self-annointed social media guru will turn this into an "ROI" story at some point...

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By DeaverB | Lincoln, MA November 5, 2009 11:12:54 am:

Wal-Mart certainly pulled off a brilliant coup--now everyone knows that Wal-Mart sells caskets. Who do you call for a funeral? A casket? Etc. Most of us don't know. Wal-Mart just stepped into that gap.

Tom Walker
www.simplymagazine.net

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By thisisplanb | Chicago, IL November 5, 2009 12:15:24 pm:

This reminds me of the Moon Wolf tee sensation from Amazon. (http://bit.ly/1IZajh) Reviewers caused the sales of the shirt to rise 2,300%, which I don't see happening with the caskets. The shirt now serves as an ironic fashion statement- which wasn't the intention of the creator.

Reviews are a tricky thing, but somehow these comedic ones gained more visibility for the brand than positive, factual ones. I'm curious to see if this helps people grow comfortable with the idea of ordering a casket for their loved ones on walmart.com.

Tori Reneker
www.thisisplanb.com

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By pro-brainstars | trois-rivieres, QU November 5, 2009 12:54:06 pm:

DEAR FRIENDS & PARTNERS,

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pro-brainstars@live.fr

4 millions hits per months because 567 % roi twitter 7 millions per month ....

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By wellsie1607 | seattle, WA November 5, 2009 11:22:09 pm:

Thank you Craig! This really brightened my day :-D

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By bgroup | Fairfax, VA November 6, 2009 10:01:43 am:

Kudos to Craig Daitch's column on spotting this.

I call it "Death by Marketing Metrics: How Wal-Mart's Funeral Caskets Prove Social Media Monitoring Aren't As Sure as Death".

The macabre reality needs to hit home; the relevancy and positive tonality, which were measured by social media metrics software between the twittering, bloginating and consumer ratings were mostly driven by iPhone/generation Y-Not users, who are not the target buyers of the caskets, and worse- some have used the freedom of the un-content managed web access to post fake product reviews, poking fun at Wal-Mart's virtual funeral parlor. So, pun intended, the operation was successful but the marketing patient is not quite alive?

What could we learn from this marketing case study?

1. Social Media Metrics are only as good as the people that read them. What appears to be successful must be highly-scrutinized to ascertain whether the target audience matches the brand buzz. Buzz on its own is worthless unless you believe that college kids are replacing their beds with comfortable padded coffins.

2. Content Monitoring- Relying on the latest software analytics, positive tonality can be easily faked so when Wal-Mart so a spike in great product reviews by using 'word analysis' or 'positive tonality' without having a marketing agency or marketing professional actually read them, the data is simply as meaningful as a "how to win the lottery" book.

3. As Albert Einstein said "Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts". And he said it before Twitter was here.

Bottom line: as corporate marketers and their agencies see the strategic shift to digital media with the promise of 'more accountable & measurable media', we should heed the warning that unless we intend to ask the right questions and actually read the responses not by a computer or an offshore $2/hour analyst, it just might be us, the marketers, that would be building our own marketing casket.

Gal Borenstein, Founder & CEO
The Borenstein Group, Inc.
www.BorensteinGroup.com

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