I happen to like pictures of people unposed, and I sometimes take them when I am in the right mood. The decisive moment of course has an important role to play in the history of photography; when I was on holiday I happened to take a picture of a man sitting on the street outside a Starbucks, and when I posted it to Flickr I thought I would find a Starbucks group to post it to. And thats where I found this hilarious thread, which is a warning to people about what happens if you jump into social media at the deep end.

At the end of September, when the official Starbucks group was started, in the social media frenzy of 2009, this thread was started, pointing out that many people had been asked not to photograph in Starbucks stores, or had been thrown out for taking photographs.

The official responses from the official moderator analisamarie started off fairly optimistically

Our formal policy is that all press-related photo inquiries need to contact press@starbucks.com prior to taking pictures in a Starbucks store. However, we have no formal policy around customers taking non-press related pictures in-store so if you hear otherwise, it might just be because your barista is camera-shy

Hmmm- good discussion! Sounds like there is a bit of confusion out there – let me take this back to my team and see what we can do to help. Thanks for bringing this up…more to come!

Then got bogged down in legal

I am making great headway here and hope to have some detailed information for you all shortly. To give you an idea of what I’m up to, I am researching if some of our international markets have policies around photography in stores. Since international laws and regulations vary country by country, this is quite the task I’m also working to see where the confusion is stemming from in some US stores. Again, stay tuned. I’m working on it!

I have been meeting with various teams in the building and learning a lot about the world of policies I hope to have something more concrete to share with you soon – thanks for your patience while I work through the details.

I am getting closer to a final ruling each day. I have a big meeting on Wednesday and after that, I will post here with an update.

I did have a very productive meeting on Wednesday of last week. We read through each of your comments and now the legal team is reviewing some of your feedback around public and private property. More meetings this week…more to come!

The social networker starts networking internally

Still here and haven’t forgotten about you. I’m writing a blog this weekend/next week about this discussion and hope to post by the end of the week. I’ll keep you in the know. Have a good weekend!

Just wrote a blog response that my legal team is currently reviewing…once I have final approval I’ll post it and let you know. I know it’s taken a while and I know I’ve said it before but I appreciate your patience. This has been quite an interesting project to work on and has involved many meetings with all sorts of teams throughout the building. SO glad you guys brought this to our attention so that we could sort it out for you!

Hints on something more negative

We want to do this in the best way possible. There are many perspectives to take into consideration as part of this discussion. That means considering our baristas’ daily work and their privacy, our customers’ experience in our stores as well as your photographic expression of that experience. We have a lot of things to consider when making decisions that affect what happens in our stores. It has to be the right thing for our partners (employees) and customers, and it has to work well for stores around the world. Please continue to be patient while we work on a solution. In the meantime, I do ask that you continue to be respectful of customers and partners in our stores. If a barista asks you not to take pictures, please respect their request. More to come – Anali

And more strongly hinting that the answer is going to be no. As several of the people in the thread point out they might as well close the sponsorship agreement with Flickr if they are going to say no to photography.

I have to add that this group isn’t explicitly here for the purpose of taking pictures inside Starbucks stores. That is one part of the Starbucks Experience but pictures of your experience out-of-store are welcome in this group as well.

This is currently her last post, a few days ago, so the story may still unfold. Possibly not as dramatically as when Amtrak police arrested someone for taking pictures for their photo competition but it has slightly broader issues than that.

First there is the timetable thing. Do not bother with social media if you can’t make decisions quickly as an organization. Period. When issues are raised by social media, you have to respond fast, because things have a habit of going viral. Two months is a joke. Fix the response times before you do anything, or when something blows up you will bodge the response.

Second, be a bit lateral. I mean, surely someone would have thought about this issue, maye the “camera-shy baristas” if internally the social media plans were discussed, but obviously this social media plan comes from head office.

Third, social media is not about head office marketing, it is about running an open, transparent business. Flickr is not Facebook, and does not have quite the same vibe (and far fewer photos actually). It is mainly a subscription platform, and many of the people there are generally quite articulate. The issue is not that they are going to complain about your coffee, which has carefully planned responses, they are complaining about the way you treat them as a commmunity. Walk right into it, unprepared.

Engagement has to be seen as a two way street; if you are not prepared to change in the social engagement and you treat it like an advertising campaign you may come unstuck.

The stupid thing is of course that Starbucks is a social space. The coffee shop, its Central Perk in Friends, its the pub in the British community, its the office when travelling. Casual photography is entwined with the social space since the Kodak Brownie; it has been reckoned that most of the data the human race has ever produced is in the form of photos (lacking a citation for that right now; would welcome one). Every mobile phone has a camera now. It is not actually hard to work out what the answer to the question should be; it even seems that that is already the policy, though no one can actually tell, as Starbucks policies appear to be secrets.

If your organization doesn’t grok social media, don’t copycat and try it anyway. maybe try a dose of Enterprise 2.0 first, and I don’t mean writing blogs for lawyers to read. This online stuff, it is going to change the way things work, until you understand that you will get it wrong.

Will be interesting to watch and see if Starbucks manage to sort this out.

Update We finally have a complete copout policy “Here’s the answer that you’ve been waiting for …Photos are allowed in our stores for the purpose of sharing them in our Flickr group.”

(Note picture taken outside Starbucks in a public space, without purchase of Starbucks beverage; however I cannot post it to the Starbucks pool as I don’t have a model release).