When you were growing up did your dad have a so-called “man room”–a haven for football worship and other dad-items banished from the house?
My dad did.
This room served as a venue for poker and a sound-proof space where he could hoot and holler at the Philadelphia Eagles football team and no one could hear him. News from the “man room” was not distributed to the rest of the family. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for my dad, we weren’t interested anyway.
When I watched the Gatorade “mission control room”–established to broaden Gatorade’s social business strategy, I could not help but think of this “man room.”
Gatorade mission control room’s flat screen TVs make this social business hub look like a mix between the Apollo 17 control room and the Nasdaq.
I imagine on a busy night the floor of the control room is covered in empty cans of red bull and pop chips. But it appears that the control room in actuality, might only be important to … the people in the control room. It’s not the fault of the people in the mission room or the people outside the mission room. It has to do with the business process that is missing from the…mission. What is the objective of this mission control room? It might just be to listen—but that’s not enough.
Let me step back a minute and share the wins of the control room according to Gatorade:
The team has had more than 2,000 one-on-one conversations with consumers, while the brand’s likes on Facebook have skyrocketed to 1.2 million, reaching the 1 million milestone a full five months ahead of schedule.
The win?
Mission Control is credited with increasing mentions of G Series Pro..[Gatorade product] by 9 percent on Facebook and Twitter.
Ok so maybe marketing is happy-but is this control room, that makes marketing look cool–really social business done well? The company also reported a second win–they were able to find “thirsty” prospects who didn’t have access to the product.
There’s a missing link…the problem lies with the fact that this was a distribution problem. The distribution department should have been notified. But as far as I could see there wasn’t any kind of formal business process to follow up on this problem.
While monitoring customer noise is important, there’s a link missing here. No one can hear the murmurs coming from the mission control room. Kudos to Gatorade for making the initial effort, but I don’t see this effort as something to truly brag about from a business perspective.
