The Return on Hurricane Tweeting
[Home Depot's Nick Ayres. Photo by his wife]
When hurricanes hit, The Home Depot, world's largest home improvement retailer, understands there's a lot of business and reputation at stake.
Such emergency preparedness items as home generators and gas cans must be stocked up in advance. That might be simple enough, except that hurricanes are moving targets. They zig and zag on short notice to endanger communities that can be hundreds of miles apart. Stocking the right stores before disaster hits can be a supply chain nightmare. Trucks, loaded with goods that can bring comfort and safety to a community sometimes need to be rerouted fast. Cold meals for thousands of employees who may work all night to prepare for emergency disasters need to be ordered before other places shut down and sent to the right stores.
Home Depot is an old hand at this stuff, however. It has a system in place, a tight act that has been refined over a good many years. As this year's parade of hurricanes meandered up the Caribbean toward the US Gulf Coast,often varying abruptly in direction and magnitude, Home Depot's Atlanta-based corporate headquarters activated it's four-room Hurricane Command Center. Its veteran crew took their places amid walls covered with maps and monitors, where they could watch an array of news channels as well as "Pulse," Home Depot's own proprietary monitoring software. This War Room could watch and respond to supply chain issues fast. As sophiccated as this all was, it was all on the supply side. The Hurricane Command Center had no direct contact with customers.
Until this year, when the company integrated it's relatively new Twitter account into the system to help customers repare and to earn what was happening to people has the storms encroached their lives.
Social media has long been active in disaster news sharing. Evelyn Rodriguez blogged her experiences when a tsunami hit Phuket in 2004. Brian Oberkirch, helped people in his small hometown of Slidell, La, find loved one's when Katrina flooded it in 2005. Emergency service organizations such as the Los Angeles Fire Department and the American Red Cross have already used Twitter to provide realtime information during natural disasters. And the Wells Fargo Bank Guided by History blog has served communities during emergencies, particularly fires. Traditional media, almost always short staffed have turned to social media to provide feet-on-the-street first person reporting in disasters.
But The Home Depot is the first commercial enterprise to use Twitter in an emergency to support customers--and increase sales--during a natural disaster. The company could have taken a mercenary approach, but it was extremely careful to not exploit the situation, but rather to serve communities in need.
The Home Deport is an unlikely social media pioneer. Until Spring 2008, its only social social media program was a YouTube channel where it posted do-it-yourself instructional videos--useful, but not ground-breaking stuff. The company had also tried polling and online contests as well as The Home Depot Garden Club , which the cimpany considers to be an online community, but essentially they were laggards in terms of breaking new ground in social media, at least from my perspective.
Nick Ayres, Home Depot's interactive marketing manager told me. "We kept looking at social media, but we just couldn't quite figure out what would make sense for us. Ayres said he remained unconvinced when he decided to check out the Blog Council, an organization comprised of some of the world's largest companies such as Coke, GM, Dell Computer, SAP all of whom were struggling with many of the same issues related to social media. Formed in December 2007, the Blog Council received a chilly reception in the social media community. But the Council is not intended for SM enthusiasts but to provide a safe and private way for members, who extoll its virtues.
John Pope, a Dell communications officer told me, "Members have been quite willing to share what works and what doesn't, and I believe that peer-to-peer openess has been a catalyst for some large companies to seriously engage in social media."
"In Florida, I engaged in several conversations that convinced me it was time to give social media a try," Ayres said. "We picked Twitter because it seemed like a low-cost, low-risk entry point."
The Home Depot assigned Sarah Molinari, a corporate communications manager to start @TheHomeDepot spend a part of her time playing with Twitter and talking with customers about local stores and hometown events. Early on, Sarah showed an ability to join conversations rather than just hype corporate policy and available goods. She showed candor and humor and started building a modest following in Twitterville.
When Gustav started rolling toward the Gulf Coast, the company started wondering if Twitter might serve a communications role. According to Ayres, the thought was that Twitter could help the company "reach further and faster. Twitter was an obvious tool for us to use to offer meaningful advice and help. To be honest, we weren't sure how the approach was going to go over or how effective it would be." The company decided on four facets to incorporate into a Twitter strategy: timeliness, relevance, accuracy and most important, appropriateness. "This was not going to be a hard-sell situation. We were not going to post: 'We still have generators, and you can buy them for $xx.'"
As Gustav approached, Sarah put her other PR activities aside and moved into the Hurricane Control Center. She posted almost continuously and was present to report when decisions were made. For example, when company officers decided to keep 12 stores open all night, Sarah tweeted the news in near realtime so customers knew what stores had which supplies.
"Before Twitter, we simply had no way to get the information out this quickly and this accurately," Ayres told me.
The more she posted, the ore it was noticed in Twitterville. The number of @TheHomeDepot followers spiked, reaching just north of 1000. News media turned to The Home Depot as a primary source of information. Home Depot management attention went to the Twitter account as well.
I asked Ayres about this and he conceded, "We didn't plan it this way. But the fact is that people greatly appreciated what we did. If gives me some pleasure to think that the next time someone needs home improvement goods in one of these communities, he or she is likely to drive right past Lowe's [Home Depot's leading competitor] to get to one of out stores." Lowe's has no social media programs.
According to Marketing Profs' Michael Rubin, @TheHomeDepot's emergency reporting/preparedness worked because Sarah used clear, direct and personal language. It never tried to hard sell to people in an emergency situation and the Twitter site became an invaluable source for spreading timely valuable information as a community participant.
Ayres added that a few additional benefit that go beyond disaster preparedness. Engaging the community during an emotionally charged time "is a great way to learn from others in real-time. Engaging the Twitter
community has become a great way for me to not only learn from others in the social media industry in a real-time fashion. More important, it taught me the value of just listening to what our customers are saying during emotionally charged situations."
This carries over, Ayres thinks, into more general situations. Home improvement projects are intensely personal and emotionally charged. Through social media, we can tap into that emotion."
Still another benefit is letting customers help each other. Often Sarah steps back at Twitter and lets her followers advise each other.
Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. Neither press, nor customers could turn to Lowe's for tips and timely information. Their competitor did not embed itself into the community like Home Depot. By lagging further behind, Lowe's can only be a follower in this particular area. As a result, Ayres added, "I have to admit that I get a good deal of pleasure realizing that because of what we've done, some people will drive right past Lowe's [Home Depot's largest competitor, inactive in social media] to get to one of our stores.
This is an example of what I recently called "lethal generosity." In social media, the companies who are the most generous to their communities will be the most influential and those who are the most influential will prevail, particularly during tough economic times that most businesses are now facing.
The Home Depot is still digesting what it has learned by this first truly interactive foray into social media. It is looking at what role it can play in other types of disasters. It is also thinking hard about how it can benefit plumbers and other mainstay customers through online conversations.
Until this Report, I've posted mostly about leaders and pioneers. The Home Depot neither claims nor does it aspire to be either. Like most companies, it's really looking for better ways to interact with customer efficiently. It seems to me that the Twitter hurricane blog has lessons for a great number of companies trying to figure out how to get closer with customer precisely when traditional marketing budgets are being reduced.
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Shel - great that you are giving The Home Depot some exposure on this. I DM Sarah myself after the hurricanes b/c I thought she did a fabulous job. I've also used this as an example of "doing it right" in presentations, most recently at the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer. Sarah is a great Tweeter!
Posted by: Donna Tocci | October 27, 2008 at 10:51 AM
Great post. As a resident of the Gulf region I understand the communication problems that come with hurricane season. It's great to see how well Home Depot was able to keep in direct contact with customers through such tough times.
From a business standpoint, I like how Ayres explains that at first Home Depot didn't know how to make social media fit into their marketing goals - "We kept looking at social media, but we just couldn't quite figure out what would make sense for us."
Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social networking site out there, it will take some deal of trial and error to find what works with your business.
Posted by: Marie Adams | October 27, 2008 at 05:30 PM
Fantastic post, the Home Depot has made a lot of progress in reacting to difficult situations and circumstances and they are really expanding their marketing efforts online as well.
Posted by: Schumacher Homes | February 12, 2009 at 08:52 AM