Bob's Red Mill -- Use of Social Media Tools -- Exercise 1

Bob’s Red Mill is discussed in blogs, bookmarked on delicious, reviewed on Yelp, and described in a Wikipedia entry.  Mentions of Bob’s are generally positive; for example, there are 64 reviews of Bob’s Red Mill Whole Grain Store (and diner) on Yelp, with an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.  Bob’s products are frequently mentioned on the blogs of hobbyist bakers and gluten-free cooks, who tend to be fans of Bob’s.  The founders of Bob’s Red Mill, Bob and Charlee Moore, recently donated $1.35 million to the National College of Natural Medicine and $5 million to Oregon State University to establish the Moore Family Center for Whole Grain Foods, Nutrition and Preventive Health.  These announcements are currently dominating the mentions of Bob’s on news outlets and food industry blogs.  Members of a peanut-allergy forum have posted their conversations with Bob’s Red Mill representatives regarding the presence of traces of peanuts in other products.  It sounds as though the members of the forum were not totally satisfied with the responses they received from Bob’s, though the customer service rep from Bob’s was careful to invite further questions and give a phone number.

Bob’s Red Mill has a company blog, written by several employees, with frequent articles about baking and cooking with whole grains.  The company holds various contests (for example, haiku written in honor of National Oatmeal Month) to involve customers.  The blog site also includes information about Bob’s support of the National Autism Society, their sponsorship of a world cyclocross racing team and a ‘Train with grain’ cyclocross support program, and their participation in the World Porridge Making Championship in Scotland.  The company seems to be effective in engaging customers online.  Customers comment on the blog and participate in polls and contests, and respond to Bob’s active Twitter posts, view their YouTube videos, and engage in conversation on their Facebook page.

For example, the Facebook page is a personal page, and fans of the company sign on as ‘friends’.  Apparently, Bob’s was recently targeted by someone who posted disturbingly violent photos on Facebook and tagged the photos ‘Bob’s Red Mill’.  Bob’s responded by changing their security settings so no one can tag them in photos, and apologizing to their friends.  They also offered to help their friends share photos in other ways, and posted “some extra sweet puppy photos to make up for the sick photos”.  The resulting conversation among Bob’s friends was supportive of the company, offered advice on the pros and cons of Bob’s setting up a business fan page instead of a personal page, and led to a discussion of another member’s site, the Gluten Free Spouse.  The feel of the conversation was of a friendly community that had rallied around the company when it was attacked by the anonymous photo tagger.

Bob’s Red mill is very proactive in establishing good online relationships with customers, and they appear to be responsive to customer questions and complaints.  Augie Ray suggests on Social Media Today that the future of customer relations lies in active monitoring of and response to online customer discussions that are not directed at the company.  Although I found no evidence to suggest that Bob’s is currently using this approach, I would not be surprised to find them doing so now or in the future, given their current level of social media savvy.

Note:  Among the reputation monitoring tools suggested for this exercise, I found Yelp, Google Blog Search, and Social Mention most useful.  The 'mentions' categorized as negative by Social Mention included words like 'hate', 'terrible', and 'sucks', but not all of them actually referred to Bob's (some were about the writer's mood, for example).  Keotag returned useful results for tags on delicious and YouTube, but gave no results or an error message for many other sites.  How Sociable was irritating to use...perhaps I need more practice.