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.

Posting business-related videos on YouTube

Dianna Huff asked the question whether or not businesses should be using YouTube for video. If you read through the comments, you'll see the opinion is mixed.

For situations where you can point people directly to your video (e.g. when you already have people on your website and you want to show them a clip), embedding the YouTube code on your page (or Google Video would work just as well here) seems to be the way to go...as mentioned by a few people in the comments of Dianna's post. That way you're not taking people to the YouTube site where there might be links to objectionable content appearing alongside yours. The other no-brainer way to post video on your own site is of course to put it on your own server, but because of the technical setup that's required, this might not be the best option for many people.

Of course, two of the major benefits of posting a video on YouTube are the viral component and the universality of its platform. These are benefits you won't get by keeping a video confined to your own website.

I would post a business-related video on YouTube if I thought it would help the clip gain a wider distribution and popularity among my target audience, even with the chance it might have links to not-so-wonderful content alongside it. It's not like business users have never used YouTube before and don't know what kind of content is posted there...and that they'll be shocked if they see a link to a stupid or objectionable video. I'd be willing to bet more than 90% of business users have been on YouTube before. They know that YouTube is like a soup with lots of ingredients floating in there -- some good and others not so good (lima beans!). They will choose to pick out the good bits and ignore the undesirable bits floating in there, without changing their perception of your brand.

Here's an example of good execution of business video on YouTube. Cap Gemini seems to understand the medium. The company is posting video regularly (when I checked, they had several videos that were posted within the last week, some last month, others two months old, etc.) so they're consistent. They also have a few formats of video -- interviews, case studies, etc.

The use of business video on social sites like YouTube is still in its infancy. I think you're going to see a lot of companies trying different things -- some succeeding, others failing miserably. The potential is there, especially within markets where visuals are important (e.g. construction equipment). But in the long run, once a set of best practices has been established for business video on social sites -- whether it's a business channel within YouTube or it's another website that gains traction and fills this market need -- you'll see a much clearer path for business video. Until then, it's the wild, wild West!

The Stupid Filter and social media

This Wall Street Journal blog post discusses a gentleman named Gabriel Ortiz who has invented a "stupid filter" for online message boards:

Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes.

After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.

As social media becomes more important to marketers, and as marketers are increasingly trying to position themselves as content providers and experts, a technology like the Stupid Filter could come into play quite prominently. Many companies are successfully using forums, blogs, and other user-generated content elements to further their brands and even increase sales...and I suspect the trend will continue.

A cynical marketer might say, "If I applied this to my target audience and filtered out all the stupid people, I wouldn't have any customers left!"

But I think the question is: Will technologies like the Stupid Filter squelch the discussion in these social media vehicles, when people know their posts are being scrutinized by a filter? Here's an interesting thing to ask yourself: How many times would your posts need to be blocked before you stopped leaving comments in forums and on blogs? For me, that number would probably be pretty low.

One could argue this whole filtering process would naturally elevate the conversation and scare away the stupid people. But just like spam filters, the technology won't ever be perfect -- so how many "non-stupid" people will be discouraged from adding to conversations? Could the Stupid Filter be a stumbling block for social media -- or is it a saving grace, much the way spam filters have saved email from becoming a completely unusable morass of junk?

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.

Google's new Social Graph API

Just launched by Google, this new tool could add a whole new dimension to social networks. It looks for connections between people on a variety of social networks, and helps to build links based on the people who already have a public connection. Pretty cool idea.

(Hat tip to Gary Stein at ClickZ)