#extrafemi

Lagos, Nigeria 2015.

Tiger Brands with its headquarters in South-Africa was buying up 63.35% of Dangote Flour Mills in Nigeria (Dangote Flour Mills, Dangote Pasta/Noodles, UAC Foods & DELI Foods). Extrafemi was contracted with the objective of positioning the Tiger Brands- DFM (as it was more popularly called then; Now Dangote Flour Mills) as a top employer brand using social media as a tool. After contracts and negotiations were done, our role as a social media agency spanned:

- Graphic design, particularly for social 

- Creating a social media presence for them, creating content, growing and managing it.

- Positioning the Tiger brands as a top employer brand to attract talent.

- Event moderation 

Then we added one more: social listening. P.S: from there on, I will refer to Tiger brands- DFM as “the client”. Since the client didn't have an existing social media presence, we created one on twitter and Instagram, created assets for approval and noticed the first thing wrong with our client.

A Top Employer Brand?

The Client felt that since the objective of the contract was to become a top employer brand, we were to only concern ourselves with one department- Human Resources and so spawned the situation where the head of marketing at the client was not aware of this thing called social media and/or was not taking it into consideration while planning campaigns but more on this later. From our experience handling social media for clients, there is mindset that comes to play when the client feels that the social media agency should concern itself with one thing/ objective and be oblivious to the rest of the organisation. This mistake also repeated itself with another client: the then largest stockbroking company in Nigeria but I digress.

Content

As we progressed with growing and managing the social media accounts, something else was a challenge: content. Managing a social media account requires constant updates and content from the HR department wasn't frequent, more importantly, it was boring. It wasn't long before we started to request more information on marketing activities, branded items and product items for giveaways. This took forever to arrive. 

While we danced tango with the client in a web of approvals and escalations, we noticed something else: After a few weeks of birthing the pages online, there were zero tweets at us for products, complaints, endorsements et al. For an everyday brand with lots of products across several demographics in thousands of households across the country, it was really weird.

Soon, the client wanted to execute a ‘buy one; get one free” campaign where customers would buy one carton of Dangote noodles and get one carton extra for free. They had paid several marketing dollars for billboards, BRT buses and several advertising channels....except social media. We were not even aware.

An Identity crisis

We took a stab at this weird occurrence: how could there not be a single tweet, mention or tag about any of the client’s products? One day, while exchanging ideas at the office, we realized that Mandy Njoku (fictional name) is not quite the same as Njoku Mandy. The identities were not the same. Perhaps our client was suffering from this same challenge? Dangote Noodles was one of the more popular names, perhaps the name TigerBrands- DFM hadnt really caught on?

Social Media Listening- A brand(life)-saver

Using tweetdeck and hootsuite, we setup listening channels for several keywords spanning the client’s previous name, products- for example: Dangote Noodles for example and so on. Within few minutes, we were swamped: complaints upon complaints. Customers were tweeting and asking other people to come pick up their cartons, looking to giveaway their noodles as the product was really bad. This was barely 2 weeks to the start of the campaigns. Clearly, this campaign was doomed to fail and dead on arrival.

We quickly retrieved screenshots of these complaints and forwarded them to the head of HR at the time who called the head of marketing immediately and scheduled a meeting. It was there and then that the campaign was suspended. This feedback was then sent to the product teams to rework the product ahead of a new release.