ReachJanuary 1 to December 1

Crisis Management 101 Stories of social media disasters from CrowdbabbleAudi USA:When Doing Something Different BackfiresBy Katie Meyer

How can your brand stand out online? When a brand chooses to do something different, it takes a risk. But as we’ve said before: no guts, no glory. Or in Audi’s case, no guts, no social media disaster.

For Audi’s Facebook account, it was all cars all the time. With the exception of spring 2014, when Audi decided to do something different…

Context – Audi USA

Failing the Driver’s Test“Instead of highlighting the cars, why not highlight the drivers? We want our users to become drivers, don’t we? If we can get them to aspire to own a car, maybe we can get them to aspire to be a certain type of driver: urban, affluent, creative. Drivers who earned the privilege of driving an Audi”

That’s probably the train of thought of Audi’s marketing team leading up to the social media fail might have gone along those lines — the plan seems logical and innovative at best, and at worst, quite harmless. Sharing photos of drivers instead of cars with the hashtag #PaidMyDues, however, was a bigger shock to users than the brand anticipated…

Failing the Driver’s Test

Rather than acting as ideal drivers that Facebook and Twitter fans would aspire to, the drivers of the #PaidMyDues campaign played the role of crash test dummies in a failed prototype.

They were smashed to pieces. As Audi Facebook fan Hironori posted: “What is this? Don’t care about stories. Car info please.”

The Aftermath

Using Crowdbabble’s daily engagement tool, we were able to zero in on the day the campaign went live on Facebook and read all user comments.

On the graph above, normally likes soar above page posts — but during the campaign, the two inverted. Engagement dropped as #PaidMyDues launched on April 30 (green circule), and likes stayed low in the months following. As shown in Crowdbabble’s story distribution breakdown for the two weeks of the campaign in 2014, shares of the campaign were also few:

The Aftermath

Sharing content on Facebook spreads content to a much wider user base than a brand can capture on its page. Did the unsharability of #PaidMyDues affect Audi in the long term?

The Aftermath

On Instagram, Audi encountered even angrier feedback from users. 12 days after the first post for #PaidMyDues, despite complaints, Audi persevered with the campaign.

Notice user Midonyk’s comment: ”Audi haven’t posted a picture [of] a car in over a week. What else is new?”

Missed Opportunities of Growth

The campaign from late April to early May created a lull in period of growth. The graph below, generated with Crowdbabble’s Instagram analytics, shows a missed opportunity for continued growth and some damage to the brand as dedicated car fans disengaged

One Year Later April/May - 2014

Comparing same period in 2015, we can see that overall engagement on Facebook is back up now that the company is focused on cars again.

As seen below, the proportion of shares is much higher this year than it was during #PaidMyDues, over the same period.

Engagement on Audi’s Facebook page, after a brief decline, has grown steadily in 2015.

April/May - 2015

Audi’s #PaidMyDues experiment shows that when a brand has created a steady base of content that is guaranteed to grow legs on social media, it can crash test new models with few repercussions. Audi has found, in its slick and speedy car posts, a bulletproof fallback plan.

If your brand is floundering, it’s probably best to play it safe rather than strike out in new directions to build your audience

When a brand is successful on social, it’s safer to throw it all away and try something new… just make sure you have a plan B if it fires back

Lessons