My favorite day of the year

I enjoy a lot of sports, but there are none that I enjoy more than men's college basketball. So today, the opening day of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, is my favorite day of the year.

Why then am I sitting at my desk instead of out watching the games? Because I'm doing both with March Madness on Demand, an advertiser-supported live video feed of the tournament. At the sports bar (or on my local TV) I'm captive to whatever game they decide to show me. Online, I can move back and forth between all the games that are currently being played (with the exception of the local game that is blacked out).

Just some of the major advertisers I saw included AIG, Coke, Dell, Lexus, Microsoft, Nike, Old Spice, Playstation and long-time NCAA advertiser Pontiac. Hat tip to Illini Wonk for the link.

Free coffee anyone?

Starbucks has always been a textbook example of how to build a brand through public relations. Today, they have once again shown why. From 10-noon, Starbucks will host its first-ever "Starbucks Coffee Break" where every one of their 7,500 stores will be giving a free tall coffee to every customer.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Starbucks employees will take coffee to customers who can't make it to the restaurants using mobile-sampling "Venti Vans" and insulated coffee backpacks.

Rather than spend millions of dollars on advertising, Starbucks is spreading their coffee gospel through one of the oldest plays in the public relations handbook: giving away free product. The payoff is in the happy customers and the accompanying media stories, which currently number in the hundreds. What are you doing at your computer? Go get some free coffee!

Hat tip to Starbucks Gossip.

Pitcher's Beware!

Hardly a day passes without PR pros noting the increased transparency that blogging has brought to corporations and industries. They warn companies to tread lightly in a world where press releases are dissected and corporate spin is unraveled online.

But that increase in transparency applies to the practice of public relations as well. Once upon a time, the worst possible result from faxing a poorly-crafted pitch was a quick trip to the editor's trash can. But email can be cut and pasted into a blog and a pitcher can bring embarrassment to themselves and their clients. For instance, I'm guessing this post didn't end up in the clipbook prepared for Motorola by their agency. (Whenever I hear examples of bad PR, I think of Stu from the movie Phone Booth shown in the photo here).

Now, there's a blog with the express purpose of outing bad pitches entitled, appropriately enough, The Bad Pitch Blog. Operated by two people in PR (Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan), the blog outs bad pitches like this one from Stephanie. Unfortunately for her, this example also includes a lesson in SEO. Due to the power of blogs in generating search results, this post is now the top result in a Google search for her name. Good luck applying for that next public relations job, Stephanie.

So, pitchers beware! Your next bad pitch could end up being immortalized on the Internet.

This water brought to you by...

Part of life today is being bombarded by marketing messages from the moment we get out of bed until we come crashing back at night. But there's always been one sacred place where we are insulated from advertising...the water cooler...right?

Not anymore. A company named AquaCell Media has implemented "Coolertising," where they use advertising on water coolers that are distributed for free to retail outlets, such as CVS and Kmart. Advertisers include Dove and CBS, who was apparently concerned that Survivor's share of water cooler talk was slipping against that of American Idol. (Hat tip to the trend spotters at Springwise for bringing Coolertising to my attention). Dove has apparently seen a 34 percent increase in sales of Dove Cool Moisture as a result of Coolertising. That sounds like ROI, meaning your next drink of water might be brought to you by...advertising.

We can just hear it now: Dasani complaining that AquaCell is destroying their business because Kmart shoppers can get the free water instead of buying theirs. The Water Industry Association of America will take AquaCell to court for water piracy. And consumers, well, maybe they'll appreciate the free water. And there will never again be that awkward silence as two gulping gossips converge on their beverage station of choice. The topic of their conversation will be pre-selected by CBS.

Technorati Tags: advertising

Who do we trust? Turns out it's ourselves

Are you in the midst of a search for that celebrity spokesperson for a big ad campaign? Perhaps you're facing a crisis at your company and getting ready to trot out the CEO to address the issue? Before you do either of those, you may want to read the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer.

According to Edelman's seventh annual survey, “a person like me” passed doctors and academics for the first time as the most credible source of information about a company. The rise has been amazing in the U.S., where trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. By 42% to 28%, rank-and-file employees are considered more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs. (Be sure to listen to the accompanying podcast from Richard Edelman on the Trust Barometer).

The average Joe is also trusted more than marketing. A study by Forrester and Intelliseek found that consumers are 50 percent more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio/TV ads.

So, where do marketers turn in a low-trust marketing world? An article on AdAge.com today says that marketers need to ask “How do we get people talking about our product, learn from what they say and tap their conversation to inform other communications efforts?” As a first step they recommend companies following Amazon and add consumer reviews, ratings and recommendations to their, or their retailers’, Web sites. If your web site has a CEO biography, but no place for customers to comment on/rave about/interact with your company, you've missed the mark.

A recent white paper from Edelman and Technorati credits this lack of trust in institutions as a factor driving the blogging phenomenon. Page 9 of that white paper gives an "Emerging Model" for communicating with your constituents. Among the better suggestions are being more concerned with conversation than control, engaging in external relationships at multiple levels, empowering employees and consumers to co-create and embracing the wisdom of the crowds. All of those tactics are made easier through blogging. If yo'ure not yet in the blogosphere, it may be time to jump in.

But the first thing marketers (and companies and CEO's) need to do is acknowledge the truths in this survey. Why put out people and messages that aren't trusted in mediums that are suspected when it's so much easier to do the opposite? That way, maybe consumers will trust you and people like themselves.

Technorati Tags: crisis communications,public relations,Technorati,Edelman,trust

Mea culpas all around

Yesterday I posted on the crisis communications blunder of International Coal Group. One of the worst things for a company about making a mistake in an instance like this is that it extends the life of the story and keeps your bad news in front of the public even longer. It gives you a new set of things to apologize for and new story lines to cover.

Because this news broke so late in the day, it sent newspapers all over the country scrambling to keep up with the changing story. One of those was our local Sioux Falls Argus Leader which put a lengthy explanation of their process on the front page of today's paper. It's an interesting read for those who want a peak behind the curtain of a newsroom. It also keeps the story on the front page for another day.

Technorati Tags: crisis communications

Coal company bungles crisis

When it comes to mistakes in crisis communications, International Coal Group, who had 13 employees trapped in a mine explosion, may have just set the new standard. Shortly after midnight last night, someone communicated that the remaining 12 miners had been found alive, but three hours later the company announced that in fact all but one had died.

CEO Ben Hatfield confirmed that "the initial communication [came] from the command center. But it was wrong." According to MSNBC News, the call came from the company or the governor's office. The New York Times said word of a rescue spread through a cell phone call from someone at the command center to relatives waiting at a nearby church...not through official channels. The mistake was compounded when the company waited more than three hours to issue a correction, despite knowing that not everyone was alive 20 minutes after the error.

Over those three hours the families of victims went from joy to anguish to anger. They have taken to calling the company "liars" and "evil." International Coal Group is going to find out the hard way that anger turns victims into powerful enemies. Lawsuits, which were likely before, are now certain and will be just as much about hurting the company as helping the victims. After making the correction, Hatfield said "Welcome to the worst day of my life." Indeed.

What went wrong? If initial reports are correct, the company is guilty of two major crisis communications sins. First, they failed to maintain control of the situation. Whether the erroneous communication came from them or not is almost irrelevant. They should have controlled all communications from the command center, something the CEO confirmed did not happen. Second, they failed to designate an official spokesperson. If all communications had come through one person (and audiences had expected that), they probably could have avoided the error or lessened its impact.

These errors are just symptoms of the underlying problem: not having an adequate crisis communications plan. What makes that even more amazing is the highly dangerous work performed by the company and their history of problems. Another sure sign of communications failure is a visit to their corporate web site. As of this post (three days after the incident occurred) there is nothing to be found acknowledging the accident or providing any information to the public. A Google search revealed no corporate response of any kind. This has all the tell-tail signs of a company that was unprepared for a crisis.

What can they do now? It's difficult to say if anything can save their reputation, but there are things they can do to mitigate the damage. First, they need to cooperate fully with all investigations and be completely transparent with the public. This includes the communication error. They must let the public know exactly how the break-down happened. Second, they must show genuine empathy to the families of the victims. They should start with paying for all funeral costs, travel costs for families, etc. It's the least they can do. Third, they must take visible, concrete steps to insure that this never happens to their company again.

Technorati Tags: crisis Communications