Fashionably Late: Franchising Still to Arrive at the Social Media Party
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months thinking about social media and its interaction with the world of franchising. Why have so few franchise networks been able to successfully leverage social media tools, and why do so few digital media agencies look to franchises as prospective clients?
Social media has taken our world by storm and has long out grown its infancy. In fact, Facebook received its first round of funding in 2004 and Twitter was founded back in 2006. Popular platforms are widely adopted both by consumers and businesses of all sizes. Whole industries have already been spun out to support social media campaigns and range from campaign management tools, to full digital agencies. Online success stories are becoming more and more common, and ROI is a key focus any campaign. Why then have only a limited number of franchises been able to leverage this medium?
Franchise is a business structure rooted in process and operational control. These origins lead to slower adoption of new technologies and innovations. Corporately controlled entities have the ability to develop and implement new strategies without consulting outside agents for support, resources, or permission; whereas franchisors must take in to consideration varying expectations from their franchisees.
Franchisors looking to implement a social media strategy face the challenge of training and coordinating franchisees of different levels of commitment and technological ability. These are issues that have not yet been effectively addressed by digital media agencies, who tend to take the approach of developing strategies in house and then rolling them out on behalf of a corporation. The introduction of tens or hundreds of additional stakeholders, each of which is essentially running an independent business, adds a level of resource strain that up until now has limited the success of franchise campaigns.
Due to the obstacles facing franchises who are looking to engage in social media, many franchises have opted to take one of two courses of action. Either the franchisor lets social media grow organically by allowing each franchisee develop a local strategy or the franchisor decides to take control of the social media strategy at a head office level. Both of these strategies fail to fully leverage the power of the tools in use. Allowing franchisees to dictate their own use of social media can create a fragmented brand image which can sometimes have negative implications for the brand overall. While running social media out of head office can help alleviate this issue, this strategy fails to leverage the network power of an organization’s franchisees.
I have come to believe that a hybrid approach is required for social media success in franchising. This approach would involve both high level strategy and local level activation. The franchisor has only limited power to spread a message when compared to the collective power of its franchisees. A local level activation strategy would allow the entity to take advantage of its network. However, consistent and competent use of social media tools across all locations would require extensive training and support for franchisees. A lack of proper planning and well laid out practices and procedures is known to be a recipe for failure in franchising, and the use of social media is no different.
While franchising is still largely uncharted territory for social media, I feel that by applying proven implementation strategies from other areas of franchising to this new medium we can leverage the power of social media across entire franchise networks in ways that have not yet been possible.
