Why Businesses Must be Aware and Wary of Social Media
Dummy's Puppet's Ramblings - from Chip Martin
Mannequin American views and guidelines on marketing/PR trends, news from the world of puppets and ventriloquism, bits of humor and other interesting but useless information. I post every Tuesday and Friday.
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A Brand That's Spot On ... Unlike the U.S. Auto Industry
If you're not a race fan, you've probably never heard of Junior Johnson. He learned how to drive cars very fast while hauling family-produced moonshine and outrunning the authorities in his native North Carolina mountains. Johnson was never caught delivering moonshine. However, Johnson was arrested by federal tax agents while making moonshine and served time in jail. He took his driving skills to NASCAR, where he became one of stock car racing's early superstars in the 1950s. His outlaw status enhanced his reputation and his brand.
Since ending his racing career, Johnson has taken his carefully cultivated country boy, outlaw image and turned it into a brand that makes sense. As you'll see in the above picture, he has a line of pork skins and country hams, and recently he launched a legal moonshine brand, called Midnight Moon. Junior Johnson knows his audience and clearly knows an appropriate brand extension when he sees it.
One of the reasons that U.S. automakers are in such trouble is that they tried to be all things to all drivers. Sorry, but you can't have every carbon-based unit as a target market. Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. BMW has maintained brand integrity - for the most part - and it's doing OK. Corvette, a division of GM, has maintained a consistent brand identity, aimed at fulfilling the expectations of a specific market segment. As a result, it's a successful GM product line, among heaps of GM failures.
Of course new government regulations aimed at dictating what kinds of cars U.S. drivers must choose from, may well lead the auto industry down the path that government-run Russian auto manufacturers took decades ago ... resulting in the worst designed cars in history ... and the total collapse of the car industry in Russia.
It's kind of mind boggling that after a free marketplace made the U.S. the strongest economy in the world, some lawmakers now want to tell rmanufacturers what they must produce and what buyers must buy. That hasn't led any other country to dominance ... but hey, who knows? Maybe this will be the one time it works.
Puppets Are People Too
If you liked the "Count" video from my previous blog, you'll like this 30 second spot. Puppets are people too. From Collegehumor. Racism is not cool.
Offensive or Effective?
This ad is being run in the UK to help convince people to clean up after their dogs. Does it work?
Well, dog poop problems have been cut in half since the Torbay Council poster started appearing in April. It got results ... but I doubt if we'd be so bold here in the U.S. And I'm never going to eat chocolate again.
"The Ugly Truth" isn't Ugly at All ... it's Funny
The restaurant orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally has been updated and made more entertaining in The Ugly Truth. Click here to see Katherine Heigl provide her version of restaurant hotness. When I first linked to this video it was 2 1/2 minutes long. That version has since been removed from the internet. This version is only about 30 seconds, but you'll get the idea.
My New Favorite T-Shirt
Okay, I admit that I'm a sucker for ETrade commercials that use the baby. My favorite is the golfing baby. "You moved your ball!" "It was on the cart path! Why don't you try reading the rules, Shankopotamus?!"
So thanks to Leslie, I now have a new favorite T-shirt. And a great Christmas gift for some of my golfing buddies! Click here to find this shirt and others including "I would go fishing with Denny Crane."
Another Example of why Businesses Need to be Aware of the Power of Social Media
I wasn't going to write about this because it's been covered so much by other news outlets. But I've received so many emails from readers about it, that I changed my mind.
A year ago Dave Carroll and his band flew United Airlines to Nebraska ... connecting in Chicago's O'Hare. Apparently while seated in the plane at O'Hare, the band and others saw the band's equipment being tossed on the tarmac in a very harmful manner by baggage handlers. (I can relate. I've been there. Really, I've been in the luggage when they kick it off the plane!) Sure enough, when he reached his destination Carroll found his Taylor guitar had been destroyed by the airline.
After a year of unsuccessfully trying to get United to fess up to their negligence, Carroll turned to what he did best ... he wrote a song about the incident. Then he produced a video. Then he put it on YouTube. It's darn funny. As of this posting the song has over 3 million views and has been featured on countless national and regional radio and TV news programs. It continues to be the focus on consumer programs, blogs, tweets, emails ... you name it. Click here to see and hear his song.
Needless to say, United has now offered to replace the guitar. Too late. Way too late. Carroll requested that they simply make a donation to one of his favorite charities.
One incident not handled correctly by company representatives resulted in United getting not just a little bad publicity ... but worldwide bad publicity. And that bad publicity continues to this day on YouTube. It won't go away for a long, long time.
Businesses need to understand that customers now have a worldwide forum for their complaints. If issues aren't' handled properly customers can use that forum to gain attention. Once that happens, it's often too late to implement damage control. The company's image and sales will be impacted. And when the complaint is spread as skillfully and as funny as this one is, the impact is that much more disastrous for the business.
The moral: Be honest and fair with customers. Otherwise, chances are slim that your disaster plan will be able to adequately respond to the consequences.
What did you say?!