Jim Gaffigan and Hot Pockets: How to deal with negative brand attention online

Jim Gaffigan is one of my favorite comedians. If you haven't seen his bit on Hot Pockets, check it out. He completely rips apart Hot Pockets -- of course in a humorous, non-malicious way. Whenever I think about Gaffigan's routine, it makes me wonder how the people at Nestle, maker of Hot Pockets, feel about it as marketers. They're doing their best to get the public to buy their product, and here they have a comedian poking fun at their hard work and their livelihood.

So let's take Jim Gaffigan's Hot Pockets skit and apply it to social media.

Catharine P. Taylor at MediaPost recently wrote a blog entry about how Target faced negative publicity because of two errors it made in handling bloggers and Facebook. So between Hot Pockets and Target, you have two examples of brands that got less-than-stellar attention -- one due to a comedian and something Hot Pockets clearly could not control, and the second because of Target's poor handling of social media. In both cases it spread virally. Even though the Jim Gaffigan bit wasn't social media to begin with, the YouTube videos have certainly turned it viral and grown it from a simple comedy bit into a small Internet fad. (Hot Pockets has tried its own viral program at HotPocketsDojo.com, featuring games and e-cards.)

You might be saying, "So what? I don't work for a huge national brand like Target or Hot Pockets. Why do I need to worry about this sort of thing?"

With social media, it doesn't matter how big or how small your brand is -- you can still face this kind of publicity crisis if your company makes a mistake. Even if you don't make a mistake, an unsatisfied customer could do damage to your company's reputation and brand. So be prepared. A few thoughts:

1. Monitor the blogosphere, relevant discussion boards, YouTube, etc. Make sure you're trying to find your customers' reactions to your products and services, both positive and negative! Google Alerts are my favorite. Set up several for your brand, your products, etc. Think about all the different ways people could be talking about your brand -- this includes common misspellings too. Do a set of Google Alerts with key words in quotation marks, and another set without.

2. If you ever run into negative social media, my number one recommendation is don't overreact. Think carefully about how you will respond. Talk to your smartest, most level-headed people to see how they would handle the situation. Call a trusted friend in the industry who doesn't work for your company. Tell them the facts, and ask them how they'd respond.

3. Speed is important, but it's not everything. It's tempting to embrace speed when you see a negative item. After all, a swift response is essential, right? I agree to a certain extent -- you shouldn't let a situation sit for a long time without dealing with it. Move quickly, but cautiously too. A smart response is more important than a quick one. Make the wrong move, no matter how fast it is, and you're going to be pouring gasoline on the flames.

4. Sometimes a response isn't necessary. It's often tough to judge this one, and I'd say the more experience you have with negative publicity, the more likely you are to know when not to respond. Depending on the claim someone makes, how credible their story sounds, and how other Internet users are responding, in some situations you should not respond and let the offending material die a slow, quiet death.

Here's an excellent blog post by Glen Allsop that offers some additional pointers for how to react to negative blog posts.

Who knows...the Jim Gaffigan / Hot Pockets situation may have actually helped Hot Pockets in the long run, by getting the name and jingle on many people's lips. Of course the context of the additional awareness wasn't ideal for the Hot Pockets brand. But sometimes as marketers, we need to understand that we're not always in control. In these situations, make sure you're able to kick back, eat a Hot Pocket, and laugh at your own product.

So what's with the name of your blog?

So I've been asked why I selected "Digital Marketing Rucksack" as the name of my blog. Here's the thought behind it:

First of all, as I wrote in the description at the top, this blog is meant to be a "wide assortment of thoughts and tidbits for your eMarketing journey." I'm not planning to blog specifically on one focused area -- I want to jump around and write a little bit about what's on my mind as it pertains to eMarketing. One day I might be thinking about Google, the next might be email marketing, and who knows what will come after that. So that's one of the reasons for the "rucksack" part of the name -- because when you're backpacking or on a journey, you carry a wide set of tools and items in that bag, just like this blog will be a wide assortment of marketing tools. (Honestly, one of the names on my rejected list was "Digital Marketing Junk Drawer." I love junk drawers because there's always a variety of handy but often unrelated items in there. But the name just sounded too...junky. And I probably keep the junk drawers in my house neater than most people.)

Another reason is quite simply because I like the word rucksack. It just has a nice sound to it. It's memorable. It stands out. And most importantly, it's likely to be pretty darn easy to Google. With two ubiquitous words like "digital" and "marketing" in the blog's title, I wanted a word that wouldn't get buried on page 3 of the Google results.

But the true inspiration was probably one of my colleagues, Jon. A couple years ago, he and I were in a conference room with another coworker, trying to brainstorm new names for the Marketplace section at the back of our magazine. The Marketplace section was a collection of classified ads that included several wildly different kinds of products or services. I don't even remember why we were trying to come up with a new name for it. At first we thought of simple names like briefcase, portfolio, or attaché. But just like with all brainstorming, eventually the suggestions got more and more strange. At one point Jon shouted out rucksack and we all liked the word, but we knew it wasn't a realistic option. Ever since that day, whenever I heard someone say rucksack (which wasn't too often), I'd think back to that brainstorming session. So I owe Jon some of the credit for planting the seed that became this blog's name.