Give them what they want

On Thursday morning last week, I saw a Facebook post from Coca-Cola in Spanish or Portuguese and another from Levi's in French.

I assume that some sort of geotargeting glitch had caused both messages to post worldwide rather than in target markets and native languages. The Levi's post had no comments, but something interesting developed on the Coca-Cola post.

 

The comment count was off - the page was blowing up with user reactions, like these:

As you can see, users had pretty strong reactions to a simple post that was simple mistargeted. Within ten minutes, there were 40 comments and more were added every minute, until the post was deleted (or otherwise obscured).

But this isn't a "gotcha" post or implication that either Facebook or Coca-Cola "failed" in some way. What happened here shows the critical importance of connecting with consumers on their terms and their expectations for content relevance.

Easier said than done, when you're a brand with global operations with brand fans around the world. So give them what they want.

 

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Comments

[Socialnerdia]

This is one of the many potential issues of having a global brand with multiple pages/accounts. It makes full sense to have one main global "property" that geotargets messages but failures like these need to be avoided. It's not possible to edit/fix a geotargeting mistake without deleting a post.

Third party services can fail at any time so we usually geotarget only within Facebook (not through a publishing tool). Still, we're all prone to human error so gotta learn from the mistakes and stay alert.

[Nickhuhn]

Wow, sometimes I forget just how Amurican many in the U.S. are... how diplomatic we must all seem to a global audience.