Creative Concepts

When our client Ouidad first launched their blog, they — and we — thought we knew exactly whom its readership would be: smart, savvy women who take great care of their curls and feel passionate about looking good.

It turns out we were half-right.

Yes, the blog attracted exactly the kind of readers we anticipated. But it also attracted a number of readers we didn’t expect, including teens, men and moms on the go. It also appealed to non-English-speaking readers in search of curly-haired tips, and African-American readers interested in more reliable hair care solutions.

So we adapted.

We helped Ouidad create new blog posts on the subjects their readers asked the most questions about. We broadened the blog’s focus to include tips for men, teens and kids (or, more specifically, their moms). And we now regularly include posts written in (or translated into) Spanish, to better accommodate Ouidad’s multilingual audience.

Our lesson?

Good companies support the customers they already know they have; great companies find ways to accommodate the customers they never knew existed.

Do you know who your customers are?

(Are you sure?)

What’s your favorite way to “discover” new customers? Tell us on Twitter.

A recent article about a social media-savvy Domino’s Pizza franchise in Chicago proves that even a bad customer experience can lead to positive opportunities.  In this case, it revolutionized the way this particular pizza shop interfaces with its customers and manages their expectations.

It also reminds us of a story about our own client, Bigelow Tea, and how they turned customer frustration into customer loyalty.

In January of 2007, fans of Bigelow’s Fruit & Almond tea were having trouble finding it in stores.  Confused, they went to the website and learned it had been discontinued.  Because one ingredient had become difficult to acquire, and due to Fruit & Almond’s relatively low sales (compared to their top-selling teas), Bigelow had opted to cease this flavor’s production.

Now frustrated with Bigelow’s decision, Fruit & Almond fans turned to the first interactive channel they could find — namely, the comments of a completely unrelated Bigelow Tea blog post — and asked for help.

After receiving a litany of impassioned comments on the subject, Cindi Bigelow blogged the economic reality of the Fruit & Almond decision and apologized for the inconvenience.  But, having also seen this situation as an opportunity, Cindi realized that Fruit & Almond tea just might be worth saving.

Bigelow already had enough ingredients to make another 400 cases of the flavor.  They used that announcement to buy their R&D department time to concoct a new recipe that could be produced cost-effectively while still satisfying the flavor’s fans.

Today, Fruit & Almond tea is still available, but exclusively online.  And, in a pleasantly ironic twist, it consistently ranks among Bigelow’s top-selling flavors in their online store.

As much as we enjoy a happy ending, we love it even more when it reinforces our core business belief: Listen to your customers.  If they care enough to complain, it means they want a reason to keep coming back.

Politics — and political correctness — are tricky things.  Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, but when a business becomes associated with a political sound bite, those beliefs can create a PR problem.  (See our previous post about what PR can’t help you do in a crisis.)

Back in 2007, Don Imus made a now-infamous remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.  As the news media swirled around the controversy, his sponsors (including our client, Bigelow Tea), were caught in the middle.  They each had to make a choice: continue to sponsor Imus’s show, or retract their sponsorship as an ethical statement?

After considering all possibilities, Bigelow did something all too rare in the business world: they led with their gut.

They publicly denounced Imus’s statement and disagreed with its sentiment, but they also continued to support him.  It was a fine line to walk, supporting an individual while disagreeing with a particular choice he’d made.

Needless to say, the public took aim at Bigelow.  Their blog became a clearing house for all kinds of opinions, from people who admired Bigelow’s judgment to those who vowed to never buy Bigelow again.  The noise got so loud, even mainstream press, like CNN and others, visited the blog to research Bigelow’s position so they could then interview Cindi Bigelow, President of Bigelow Tea, about the company’s decision.

Had Bigelow acted differently in this case, they might not have needed to make a public statement.  They might not even have needed to mention their choice at all.  But with our support and guidance, they opted to use the two-way channel of their blog to speak directly with the people most concerned about the incident, and to understand exactly why their choice may or may not have upset their potential (and existing customers).

In the end, like most tempests in a teapot, the Imus issue was resolved and the public turned their attention to newer, shinier controversies.  Meanwhile, Bigelow Tea’s own market share continued to grow, with the exposure — both positive and negative — from the incident doing little to curb their long-term sales.

And when Imus landed a new radio show, Bigelow was there to sponsor him again.  In fact, Cindi Bigelow herself was part of the Imus Radiothon this past week, helping to raise money for children battling cancer.

So… do we all make mistakes?  Absolutely.  But we also make good choices, too.

When judging a person — or a brand — it helps to take the whole of their actions into account.  And with the reach and permanence of social media, it’s easier than ever for discerning consumers to research the brands they’re interested in and decide for themselves which companies are worth supporting.

In a recent post for Social Media Today (SMT), Tactical Transparency author Shel Holtz makes the case that traditional PR can still be just as effective of a marketing resource as the hot new grassroots options like “trusted peers” and word-of-mouth.  The catch?  In Shel’s view, traditional PR needs to start operating a little more… non-traditionally.

Holtz advocates newly-popular concepts like acting transparently, forsaking astroturfed messaging, etc.  Common sense, really.  It should go without saying that PR agencies ought to engage people in ways the people themselves find meaningful, rather than using new tools to reinforce old, erroneous and ineffective messages.  And yet… why have Holtz and countless others had to go out of their way to say it?

The popularity — and, in some ways, the mere existence — of books like Holtz & John C. Havens’s Tactical Transparency and Chris Brogan & Julien Smith’s Trust Agents would seem to signal that audiences now crave a return to authenticity in media.  But how did the practice — or the perception — of PR ever stray so far from these principles to begin with?  Why is social media heralded as an antidote to unsavory, top-down control of a company’s messaging?  And how have common sense observations about the need for honesty become so resonant?

It’s flattering to believe that social media is somehow immune from the excesses (or improprieties) that have become associated with the black hats of PR.  But that’s a false sense of entitlement.  If we’re all smart, the next stage of social media’s integration into mainstream messaging will focus less on how new messages are spread and more on what those messages are actually saying in the first place.

When we saw one of our clients, Bigelow Tea, mentioned in The Twitter Book (by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein) as a positive example of how businesses should use Twitter, we were ecstatic.

And then we realized we’d stopped taking our own advice.

In the book, O’Reilly and Milstein applaud Bigelow Tea for using conversational tweets to direct traffic to their tea-related blog posts, rather than those generic “New Blog Post: Topic X” auto-tweets, which most users have now begun to subconsciously tune out.  Naturally, we were pleased — until we realized the Twitter Tools plugin we’d just installed on the Bigelow Tea Blog was doing precisely what The Twitter Book had lauded us for not doing, all because we hadn’t double-checked the plugin’s default checkboxes.

So we disabled it.  (The auto-tweet part, not the whole plugin.)  Our lesson?  Sometimes a compliment can help you find even more ways to improve.  (And, while you’re at it: make sure you double-check the details…)

Yes everyone is writing about social media…millions of articles about how you as a business should be utilizing the social networks…linkedin, facebook, blogging….so now you have heard it, you read it every day, you have tried to get on board but how does it all really begin?

There are many “social media experts” out there…those who know just enough of the verbiage to get the new account, those who might know a little something more to create an online conversation but not enough to keep it coming, and then there are the true experts who are in the thick of it all and understand how to build an online community for themselves and their clients…they have believed in social media for years, not just months.   They are the true social media experts who don’t call themselves experts because they are forever learning and then share the wealth with their clients.

These social media enthusiasts have a very good idea of your short and long term communication and marketing strategies!  They are very clear about your branding whether you are using words and/or images!  They have studied what each social media channel demands and what your particular community wishes which means they know how to  listen first!  And then they combine all of these skills and communicate effectively!  These experts are clever and empathetic…good listeners with entertaining and knowledge-filled comments, and they know how to engage and build a community one person at a time.

Does this sound hard?  Something to be afraid of?  Maybe just a little, but knowing you have lead your business to where it is today, how can this one step be that much different than putting on an event, writing a press release or creating an ad?  As I say in this article in the Illinois CPA society magazine, Insight, “in every channel, you can find your next consumer, an individual who is interested in hearing your brand’s message!”  Now if that isn’t motivating enough to jump into social media (with a true expert by your side to relieve the anxiety), then I don’t know what is!

The recent increase in conversations about the pros and cons of blogola — AKA the “grey area” practice of bloggers getting paid by sponsors to write blog posts about those sponsors — highlights the issue at the heart of social media: trust.

Blogs exploded in popularity due to ease of use, but it was the growth of an audience that led each blogger to feel that his or her blog was valid.  Yet the mere existence of an audience is enough for some people to believe that audience is aching to be marketed to.  This has inspired bloggers around the world to consider using their newfound clout to suggest how their audiences should spend their dollars — preferably at a profit to the bloggers themselves.

Which is fine, as long as those suggestions are independent opinions.  No one is advocating that bloggers starve.

But when a sponsor pays a blogger to positively review that sponsor’s products and services AND when that blogger fails to mention that they’re being paid to do so, that author risks losing their credibility. No one likes being misled, even over something as simple as which dish soap or bubble gum their favorite blogger claims to use daily.  What bloggers lack in credentials, they make up for in the implied trust of their readership; actions that erode that trust will drain all credibility from that blogger’s reputation over time — and acquiring a reputation in the blogosphere is a hard-won goal that’s worth protecting.

Marketers: Bloggers — and their audiences — are valuable resources who deserve to be respected, not manipulated.  You wouldn’t expect a mainstream magazine or TV news outlet to run your commercial as a news story, so don’t provide bloggers with an opportunity to sabotage their (and your) reputations.

Bloggers: respect your audiences (and yourselves) enough to be forthright about your sponsorships. Your audience wants you to succeed; they just don’t appreciate being lied to in the process.

Well we are very excited about all the good stuff coming our/your way.  As you probably know we have our Business Smart Tools conference coming up tomorrow, Tuesday May 5th.  Speakers from Bigelow Tea, Pitney Bowes, Ford and PepsiCo will present, we will feature true social media experts and we will include breakout sessions on Twitter for Business, The Power of Video, Where do you begin Online and the ROI of Social Media (and a personal thank you to our great sponsors MarketWire, Everett Hall Associates, and CitySquares!)  You can’t beat this event for social media education and excitement especially seeing that you get lunch and a great networking cocktail party thrown in!  You can still register here.

We are also excited because we are right around the corner from launching our new website!  Flash based sites were cool how long ago…we know…too long ago, and that’s why we are updating it to reflect who we are, a PR and Social Media consultancy with fluency in communication both online and off via blogs, social networks, video and more.  Can’t wait!

And finally we are so excited about our new client Ouidad who are great people with a great product and service.  As you can see from my photo, I have naturally curly hair and well my curls were cured when I found Ouidad.  We have just launched their new blog so take a look and let us know what you think.

Well there will be more to report after the conference, after our new site goes live, after Ouidad has been up and running for a bit and after we announce or next newest client.

Stay Tuned!

Valorie

I say this blog entry is Part 2 because this is really a continuation from my previous blog on how not to use the internet to find a job.  Here is the story:  Heather finally found the previous blog entry and the  following then occurred: 

1. there was an anonymous comment made which was posted at the same time Heather emailed me personally (which lead me to believe that it was actually Heather posting the comment based on tone and timing).
2. Heather stated her case or fought her battle via email instead of on the blog.
3. Heather then sent me an additional email asking for me to take her name off the previous blog entry. 

For the sake of argument, let’s replace Heather now with Company A  but still use Heather’s actions to demonstrate how a company should not approach social media.

First, you must know that any content you put up on a blog, a social network, video or more is now public domain.  You as a company are now subject to scrutiny and people can now voice their opinions, positive or negative, about your product or service.  Always think about how you want your customers to perceive your company…are you a solid company that your customers can rely on?  Do you provide entertainment for your customers?  Who is your target audience and what is their voice?  These are a few questions to ask yourself when you think about posting your content along with your company messaging/branding.

Second, let’s say your company has a blog, you posted your content and another blogger criticized you either for your message or your product or service.  Never, never, never work in stealth mode and leave an anonymous comment.  Anyone who has any kind of experience can track down who left a comment via ISP or sheer deduction like I did.  If you as a company leave an anonymous comment, all credibility is lost and you now look like the guilty party who has done something wrong. 

Having said all of this, use the comment section of the blog to state your case.  If a blogger has something negative to say about a service, for example, use the comment section to thank them for their insights and address the problem.  This allows you, in a public forum, to redeem your company.  You want to show everyone interested that you care and will resolve the problem quickly.  By sending an email to the blogger, you are only addressing that one indivdual (vs. all who read their blog) and can only hope that the blogger will say something positive or even mention your company at all.  If you take action in the comments section, you can be proactive and control your messaging.

And finally, asking a blogger to take your company name off of their blog shows your lack of experience in the blogosphere and shows you are doing the old corporate thing by trying to hide in times of trouble.  The internet tracks everything.  Even if a blogger took your company name off of their blog, you could still find a previous entry on other blogs who may have quoted the original entry and of course through RSS feeds.

So, lessons learned on how to blog for any company:

1. Always be aware that once you put out your message, it is on the internet to stay.
2. Welcome criticism and learn from it!
3. Transparency is key for surviving all social media efforts.  Always let everyone know who you are and what company you represent.
4. If a blogger makes a comment, positive or negative, repsond on their blog…the same goes for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and all other social media sites.
5. Never ask for your company name to be taken off a site.  Your company will be destined for more scrutiny and more comments or another negative blog entry!

Happy Blogging!

A big thanks to Debbie Weil for including Bigelow Tea’s blog on her very extensive and well thought out list of corporate blogs, see more here.