Category: Branding

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An 8-year old girl had her birthday party at a Target. Social media wanted an invite.

As if we didn’t already love Target, a store in Georgia showed us why this company continues to get the little things right.

An 8-year old girl wanted to have her birthday party at a Target. Apparently she’s a huge fan of the retail chain. Sometimes you can’t try to understand what makes kids happy. If it’s spending a day with your friends parading around as Target employee, so be it. Kids are weird. If it was Walmart I’d be concerned, but Target makes sense. Great stores, clean, pleasant atmosphere and overall a very easy shopping experience.

The family got special permission from the manager to have the birthday party at the store in East Point, GA. The girl’s niece documented the festivities on Twitter, sharing photos of the birthday girl and her friends drinking Icees, ringing up gift cards in the check out line and living the dream as a Target employee.

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“We bought all the kids gift cards to spend on an item of their choice and my niece got to check them out! Seriously Manager Albert was the best!!! Thanks so much Target!” – @RikDrip/Twitter.

Target owes so much to the store manager, Albert, who went above and beyond for this girl and her friends and family. He made them name tags, helped with a scavenger hunt around the store and agreed to host the party in the first place. He could have easily said no, and this heartwarming story would have never seen the light of day.

It came from the kindness of his heart. He had no idea millions of people would see his efforts recognized on social media. It’s these moments where brands can capitalize on the power of a good story. If you create a memorable customer experience, show some compassion and go the extra mile, people will want to share these special moments online.

It was organic, unforced and the best PR money could never buy. For Target, it reinforces their reputation as a creative brand that continues to stay relevant in a congested online and brick and mortar retail sector.

I’ll cheers to that.

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Gillette’s New Campaign Repositions Brand for the Future

P&G and Grey Advertising took a massive leap this week with a brand that has kept their advertising relatively safe and predictable given its target audience and male-dominated consumer base. For 30 years, Gillette’s “The Best a Man Can Get” was a great tagline for selling razors, but the hyper-masculine brand needed to adapt and reposition their brand for the foreseeable future.

This week Gillette launched a new campaign with the tagline, “The Best a Man Can Be.” A YouTube video associated with the campaign has been highly controversial to some and a welcome sight for others. The video addresses issues surrounding toxic masculinity and encourages men to change the status quo when it comes to bullying, sexism and other normalized and unacceptable male behavior.

I applaud Gillette and P&G for making such a bold move, clearly knowing this ad would be highly polarizing. Advertising should change with society. Consumers want to see brands stand for something, any issue that aligns with their own beliefs and values. The backlash surrounding this video is exactly why the world needed to see it. Advertising has become too safe, and companies have been reluctant to align their brands with issues that could affect their bottom line. Along with Gillette, brands like Nike with Colin Kaepernick and Pepsi with Kendall Jenner (kidding) are pushing boundaries and setting the bar high for cause campaigns in 2019.

The Gillette ad is not virtue baiting and is not an attack on males and their morals. Fragile, emasculated men might be a little triggered as evidenced by the nearly 900k dislikes on YouTube,  but if anything the ad achieved its goal of starting a conversation that’s been long overdue. Men CAN do better, and it doesn’t take an ad to remind us of that. The #MeToo movement created a cultural shift in society over the past few years. Advertisers are adapting to a new world where products and services take a back seat to the issues surrounding brands and the consumers with a personal connection to them.

With this new campaign, Gillette is positioning their brand for a future where masculinity and the ‘ideal male’ will take on an entirely different look. If a brand wants to use their clout and online influence to spark real change, let’s give them an opportunity to do it tastefully and creatively. Gillette got it right, and I hope other brands follow suit.

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Brands Need a Plan for Facebook Live

As any public relations professional will tell you, strategy, calculation and precision are ingredients guiding every decision that is made during a communications campaign. SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) goals are set, objectives are established and tactics are identified to show how these goals and objectives will be accomplished throughout the duration of the campaign. A well established communications plan will help guide your efforts throughout the campaign, and a similar plan will also help achieve success using Facebook Live, the social media giant’s live streaming video feature. Facebook Live is now available to all Facebook users, pages and brands, and it’s important for social media coordinators and managers to develop a “Standard Operating Procedure” to help your organization remain consistent, efficient and prepared as you begin using Facebook Live to promote your brand.

The FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute has been exploring Facebook Live and discussing its potential benefits for promoting fish and wildlife research throughout the state of Florida. As the social media coordinator for the institute, I led efforts to create a framework for Facebook Live as it relates to the overall social media strategy for our brand. Over the past two years we’ve implemented more video into our content plan, and live video offers another exciting avenue to engage our audience in unique and interesting ways. To help other organizations that are making the leap into live video, I’ve included our new communication plan specific to Facebook Live. Instead of going in with guns blazing, we’re building a road map to help us effectively use Facebook Live as a vital brand building tool for years to come.

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Arby’s No Longer Serves Police Officers

Arby’s made national headlines this week, and it was not for their delicious curly fries. A Pembroke Pines restaurant employee refused to serve a police officer at a drive-thru, and the city’s police chief did not take kindly to the news. The chief contacted Arby’s corporate executives directly and demanded an apology. Arby’s issued a public statement and apologized for the employee’s actions, but from a public relations perspective that’s like putting a band-aid on a broken window. Arby’s needs a lesson in crisis communications. It’s clear their public relations team was not prepared to handle a situation of this magnitude. The online community is threatening to boycott their brand, and the company has done very little to assure customers that the issue is being resolved.

The story has spread like wildfire on social media. The company is being more reactive than proactive with their communications efforts. Arby’s hasn’t made a post on their Facebook page since August 29, and they failed to issue a statement on social media explaining the situation, apologizing and offering ways to right their wrongs. Was the employee fired? What is being done about it? Why should we trust Arby’s and their employees? It’s important to take responsibility, not ignore the problem and wait until it blows over.

The company is keeping the public in the dark when they should be acting as transparent and honest as possible. More proactive steps are needed to educate and inform the public. Instead, they’ve allowed the media and their own customer base to dominate the discussions that are happening across social media. Arby’s is more interested in promoting their new sliders instead of doing some much-needed damage control and building goodwill with their audience.

Corporations are not invincible. There comes a time when a brand will come under fire when they least expect it. A crisis communications plan needs to be in place. In less than 24 hours the entire nation caught wind of this story. An interaction between a fast food worker and a police officer is now threatening a well-established brand, and their comms. team has essentially lost control of the situation.

“All Cops Eat Free for a Day” would be a simple campaign Arby’s could start to earn back the trust of the public and police departments across the nation. It may have been an isolated incident, but the brand is still affected wherever it operates. A simple statement will not cut it. A call to the police chief is not sufficient. This story has legs, and right now it’s outrunning the Arby’s brand in every possible direction.

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Obama Embraced Social Media. It Won Him Two Presidencies.

My relationship with Obama can be described as a honeymoon period that never ended. I admired this man since my freshman year of college in 2008. I didn’t follow politics or listen to NPR. I didn’t know who he was until his presidential run. But when I first heard him speak, he had that swagger that was hard to ignore.

His communications campaign and use of social media captivated me beyond belief and motivated me to pursue a career in public relations. It had a profound impact on my life and career. It also forever changed politics in the digital age.

It wasn’t just a political campaign, but a well-calculated and strategic communications strategy targeting young, educated students on the platforms they used most. It ultimately won him the 2008 election and helped build a larger online community that helped him win a second election in 2012. Social media outreach also allowed the Obama campaign to collect important data on his audience and use that data to create content and strengthen the campaign as it gained momentum. Volunteers signed up to help with campaigning, followers gave up their personal information for tickets to rallies and other events. Politicians worked hard to get this kind of information from voters. Obama got it with little to no effort, but his supporters didn’t care. They were a part of something big, a blue wave that reached every corner of the internet.

It helped that Obama was the first presidential candidate who was not a baby boomer. He was young, charismatic and open to new technologies and ways to bolster his support online and in-person. Social media offered everything Obama and his team needed to reach constituents and engage with voters.

It also allowed him to speak to his followers directly without the need for traditional outlets like TV, radio and newspapers. He set the foundation for government communications campaigns and ushered in a new approach to campaigning online in the 21st century.

That 2008 campaign broke a lot of new ground on platforms that were not widely used when he ran his first presidential campaign. That’s what makes this accomplishment even more special. With very little experience and knowledge of social media and how it could be used, Obama still realized its potential and poured a lot of time and resources into it. It’s what made Obama such a great leader as our president and a visionary in the social space.

 

 

 

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Gordon Ramsay Gave Up on This Bakery. So Did the Internet.

A company’s online reputation is crucial toward building goodwill, trust and loyalty among consumers. This week one particular restaurant discovered how easy it is to destroy a brand overnight.

Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro took it to a whole new level of crazy earlier this week. The internet had the pleasure of following this embarrassing social media meltdown since it first erupted Monday night. To provide a bit of background, the restaurant is located in Scotsdale, Arizona and was recently featured on an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Ramsay tried to salvage this lost cause of an establishment, but even he wasn’t able to tame these the crazies. The episode of Kitchen Nightmares aired in Dec. 2012, and five months later they’ve made national headlines spurring from multiple social media blunders on Facebook, Reddit and Yelp.

Online users flooded these sites with negative comments about the restaurant’s unstable owners, sub-par food and questionable business practices. The owners, Samy and Amy, were responding to users who were only fueling the fire at this point. It got ugly when the two started sending out threatening Facebook posts with expletives.

When shit hit the fan, they tried to backtrack by saying their social media accounts were hacked. You really can’t make this stuff up. They were swallowed up and spit out by the internet and it was all their own doing.

Any social media coordinator knows that when negative comments are flooding in, it’s sometimes best to just leave them be. Some may need to be addressed, but sometimes people just need to vent and that’s okay too. Every comment doesn’t require a response. Moderation takes practice, patience and thick skin, but the owners of this bakery clearly didn’t get that memo.

In light of the recent act of social media suicide, Forbes compiled a list of six key things you should never do on social media. If we can take away any piece of advice from this story, I think it would be to never fight the internet. You will never win.

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