Zynga Tries to Use the Back-door

What many companies fail to understand nowadays is that ANYTHING can affect their reputation, even how they handle redundancies. And this is even truer after the digital revolution, in a world where the word-of-mouth can reach a much wider public in a very short time, thanks to social networks such as Twitter. You know what I'm talking about, right? The Zynga case, of course.

(taken from here)

WHAT HAPPENED

Right on the day of the launch of the iPad Mini (during the launch itself!) Zynga communicated to more than a hundred of its employees that they had two hours to leave the premises, as they were being made redundant. Such a coincidence huh?

And of course someone started tweeting...

The result? Share prices dropped and no one really liked Zynga's behaviour. 

MY OPINION

So you see? Reputation is something so wide that can be influenced by so many factors... a company should really give a tiny little thought about it before doing any action that affects any of its stakeholders. This brings me back to some of the lectures I followed last year, where I was told that PR should influence a company's management, in order to guarantee the sake of its reputation. This has never been so true today. I'm not saying that PRPs should be called for every decision being made, every single detail being fixed; however, asking the opinion of a PRP (in-house) before making such a major move, would have benefitted the company. 

And if it was the PR department that made that decision, in order to try to hide the redundancy news, I think the whole department doesn't really know anything about what's going on nowadays. I mean... Making 100 people redundant during the Apple's launch and getting away with it is not even slightly realistic.

In conclusion, I believe organisations should behave at their best (i.e. as if they were in the spotlight) in all circumstances, most of all when any of their stakeholders are involved, AND that PR considerations should be taken into account before taking any major decisions. Also, something to keep in mind is that employees, future employees, and ex employees are powerful stakeholders of a company that have opinions, friends, and social media profiles - it's not all about the media and journalists.

I'd really love to hear your thoughts about this case and any reflections you have to offer about it.

empty13

Today I want to talk about empty13, the campaign that aims to bring together communication experts from different fields for a stimulating debate. But what is it all about?

The campaign was launched by Bite Communications on 19th July 2012 and aims to generate a debate around the lack of 'big events' in 2013 and the meaning this has for brands.

Advertisers, PRPs, journalists, agencies, anyone involved in the industry can join the online conversation using the hash-tag #empty13 on Twitter. The agency opened the @theempty13 account to generate interest and awareness. Moreover, a website was created in order to offer the participants an open space where to discuss in further detail the topic. Anyone can in fact publish a post on the website.

The conversation has already started both on the website and on twitter.

MY OPINION

I find this campaign very clever and stimulating. I really like the idea of an extensive online conversation amongst experts from the different industries and the sense of community this can generate. I am in love with the name 'empty13'; I find it very powerful and memorable. I also believe this campaign can lead to more engaging topics such as the continuous need of generating stories and news for brands and organisations, following the digital revolution. It is not the first 'empty year' for the marketing industry - marketers always need to create new stories around brands. This is an undeniable truth.  It would be sufficient to think of the famous smoking campaign launched by Edward Bernays in the 1920s. It would be interesting to hear how experts feel about this constant need for newsworthy material and how they deal with it in their day-to-day lives. 

#ShellFail - The (Greenpeace) Le'ts Go Campaign Hoax

Just last week, at the International History of Public Relations Conference, I heard a debate about 'professional PR' and 'activist PR'. The present experts and academics were discussing the issue of professionalism in PR and whether not-for-profit PR could be deemed as professional. I am quite sure that after the latest Let's Go campaign signed by Greenpeace, they will have no more doubts...


THE  CAMPAIGN

A fake launch event in Seattle, at the Space Needle, last June (2012) marked the start of the campaign. As you can see in the video, something went terribly wrong at the event...

The video was spread on Twitter with the hashtag #ShellFail and went viral. It also has a dubstep remix!

A fake Shell website (Arcticisready) was also created by the activist group.

On the site, the new (fake) Shell campaign 'Let's go', which was all about new drilling actions in the Arctic, was being promoted and users were given the opportunity to contribute by creating ads like these: 

A kids section with the game Angry Bergs (obviously recalling Angry Birds) was also available. 

A bogus Twitter account (@ShellisPrepared) was also created. 

The tweets looked rather suspicious and often unprofessional, so it wasn't difficult to understand who was actually tweeting...

However, the tweets helped spreading the ads and increasing the popularity of the #arcticsready trend.


Greenpeace admitted the campaign was launched by them and now that the hoax is public, the environmentalist group is spreading a new trend - #TellShell - in order to launch its last tactic - a competition.

Twitter users who tweet the hashtag will have the chance to win a t-shirt.

Shell sent out news releases stating that the company was considering legal action. However, it seems that the oil giant is taking its time to respond to the 'attack'.

MY OPINION

As the French would say... fantastique! The idea and the implementation are simply brilliant. Excellent way to 'undermine a personality' (Cwalina et al. 2011). I think there is no doubt: not-for-profit and activist PR can be as creative and as effective as for-profit PR. The level of professionalism in a number of cases is equal, as previously demonstrated by the performance of Greenpeace, WWF, Save The Children, Unicef, and many more organisations. Shell will struggle to react to this clever strategy.

(All images in this post are screenshots I took because I suspect the ads will be removed shortly).


Reference:
Cwalina, W., Falkowski, A., Newman, B.I., 2011. Political Marketing: Theoretical and Strategic Foundations. Warsaw: Sharpe Incoroporated.

Life. Live it.

There are a lot of smart and good campaigns launched by the Red Cross, many of which are focused on educating the target audience in order to empower it - a common strategy in health promotion.

Life. Live it. was launched in 2011 to educate children and teenagers the basics of first aid.

THE CAMPAIGN

The key message of the campaign is: some very easy procedures can save the life of a friend.

Tactics:

° A mini-website filled with resources that help teach children aged 5 to 11 some basic notions;

° A kit that teachers can  use to educate 11 to 16 year-olds;

° A Facebook page;

° A contest that gives the chance to win 1 to 3 'Pushover' frisbees signed by the Bombay Bicycle club. Contestants needed to share the Facebook status of the Facebook page;

° A Twitter account. 

MY OPINION

I believe this campaign has not much of creativity, but it is effective and to the point. Many health promotion or public information campaigns need to be direct and aim for concrete results. On the Facebook page you can read: 'if your friend had too much to drink and passed out - would you know what do to?' Simple and to the point, just like the campaign. 

#McFail - Beware of the Hashtag

From a brilliant example of PR to... a flop. Today I want to talk about the famous McFail.

(taken from here)

WHAT HAPPENED?

A few months ago (January 2012) the McDonald's started a 'hashtag campaign' on Twitter with the aim of generating some publicity and quality User Generated Content (UGC). They launched #McDStories and #MeetTheFarmers as promoted tweets.

It all started off pretty well with the McDonald's official account telling stories about the production of the burgers and cheese process... But soon enough Twitter users hijacked the hashtag and started tweeting disgusting stories and comments about past experiences at McDonald's.

                                                                 (taken from here)

(taken from here)

(taken from here)

(taken from here)

(taken from here)

Animal rights groups took the opportunity to share horrific images of McDonald's food.

The campaign lasted less than 2 hours. Rick Wion, social media director, had to call it off straight away.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

The social media team probably got stuck on the 'big idea', deciding to ignore the risks that it involved. The association between McDonald's and the word 'stories' was a dangerous one, and I refuse to believe that no one in the team raised their voice to question the campaign before the launch. With such a big name and a long history of complaints though, it was naive for the company to hope that it all would have worked out fine.

LESSON TO LEARN

UGC cannot be controlled on micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter. There is no chance for the companies to moderate the content and tone of what people think and publish. If you are really eager to launch a campaign that involves UGC, try to do it in a more controlled environment such as Facebook. There you can set your own rules before launching the campaign and then have the right to delete deleterious comments. Also, we must remember that the best UGC is usually spontaneous. If we try to force the public to write/talk about us, it can end very badly.