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.

Engagement mapping: good article, and links to more information and resources

About two months ago, I blogged about Microsoft's Engagement Mapping (see post here) and how it could change the industry, since it's a more accurate representation of how online ads really work.

Here's an interesting new article about engagement mapping written in MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider. It does a nice job of breaking down a couple recent reports and white papers on the topic. The article also links to some resources on engagement mapping provided by Atlas, such as a white paper, two webcasts (one for advertisers and another for publishers), and an FAQ about engagement mapping.

Webcasts: What's more important -- leads or thought leadership?

The April 7 issue of BtoB magazine has a graph with results from an online poll they conducted about webcasts. The question was "What's your top webinar objective?" and the two choices were leads or thought leadership. Interestingly enough, 69% said their top objective was thought leadership and only 31% picked leads.

These results really surprised me. I'm sure this wasn't a scientific poll, so perhaps I should take this data with a grain of salt. But in my many years of experience conducting webcasts, I'm accustomed to most sponsors being obsessed with leads. That's how sponsors usually evaluate success -- based on number of registrants and number of attendees, plus the quality of those people. It's just the way many companies are set up right now...they're dependent upon leads.

But after thinking about this poll, I realize just how difficult of a question "thought leadership or leads" is. A webcast needs to do both to be effective, so it's silly to say that one or the other is the primary goal.

If a webcast doesn't generate leads, it's going to be difficult for the sponsor to quantify results. How will sales and marketing turn that thought leadership into action without leads? But on the other hand, if the webcast doesn't provide thought leadership, the leads are actionable but they're not nearly as valuable. After all, there are a lot of easier and less expensive ways to get leads. But the thought leadership conveyed during a well-executed webcast, combined with the fact that the person just sat through an hour-long presentation about a topic, makes for a very qualified lead.

This is exactly why I believe webcasts are so popular in B2B markets right now. It's not about the lead -- nor is it about the thought leadership. It's an inseparable combination of the two.

Microsoft's (potentially) killer app for online advertising

If Microsoft is successful with one of its latest ventures into online ad tracking, it could end up revitalizing the entire world of brand advertising.

As Scott Karp wrote about in his Publishing 2.0 blog, Microsoft's experimental Engagement Mapping could help advertisers quantify the results of online branding ads -- what he calls the "holy grail of advertising."

Explanation via CNET:

Say a consumer sees an ad for a product in a video ad one day, and then clicks on a text ad to visit the retailer’s site the next day, and then eventually sees a banner ad that leads to a purchase. All of the monetary credit tends to go to the text link that was clicked on, says John Chandler, principal analyst for Microsoft’s Atlas ad serving division.

“Under our (Engagement Mapping) model, those will share the credit,” for example, with 40 percent each going to the video ad and the text ad and 20 percent going to the banner, he says.

Finally Microsoft might have a advertising technology that -- if it pans out -- puts the Redmond-based software giant on par with Google. What Google AdWords has done for direct response/lead generation advertising, Microsoft's Engagement Mapping could do for brand advertising.

I see this as a potentially huge development in the online ad space -- one that could help move many companies' advertising budgets back toward branding ads. During the dot-com boom, brand advertising was in fashion (remember the 600-page issues of Industry Standard and Red Herring magazines?). But after the bust and subsequent advertising recession in 2001, branding fell out of favor at many companies, replaced by lead-generation advertising that enabled easy ROI calculations. Since then, marketers have been addicted to leads because leads have been much easier to quantify than the impact of branding ads. But Microsoft's technology could change that.

Will it actually work? I have no clue. But if it does, be prepared for the next revolution in online advertising.

Banners are good for more than just clicks

"If you’re only doing banners and buttons and only tracking clicks, you’re missing a huge opportunity."
-- Shawn Riegsecker of Centro, on the integration of online and offline campaigns. During his presentation at the recent Web Association event, Riegsecker talked about advertisers who saw their ROI on pay-per-click ads drop 30-40% when they discontinued their online branding campaigns that included banner ads. His point: Generating clicks isn't the only way a banner can be successful.

Social media versus advertising in an economic downturn

This post by Josh Bernoff predicts that social media will be the choice of marketers during the economic downturn. He advocates cutting traditional advertising when budgets get tight, and moving your money to social media because it’s in a different part of the purchase process — consideration (versus awareness with traditional ads).

I agree that social media should be an increasingly important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. But social media’s use really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Social media, search ads, and email marketing can be great and relatively inexpensive tools for your marketing, but there are many situations where there’s no substitute for awareness.

For example, I’ve been working with a client who is an innovator in a brand new product category. This client is a large established company, but the particular breed of technology they’re talking about is relatively new to the market. Manufacturers simply don’t know about it yet.

Would social media be a good choice for this company? Not at this stage. They’re still in their infancy — where potential customers don’t know anything about the solution…and the customers don’t even know they HAVE a problem! With social media, they’d end up preaching to the choir — a tiny group of people who already know about this new solution and think it’s great. But without a loud voice (read: advertising) to educate the market about the problem, this company would be missing the critical mass they desperately need. Social media can’t do that on a large scale nearly as effectively and reliably as advertising can.

Awareness is critical to many marketing campaigns. Social media can be very useful, but don’t make the mistake of throwing away your advertising campaigns for applications where social media isn’t warranted.