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How To Fix Bad Press In 3 Easy Steps

We’ve all been in a situation where an employee delivered terrible customer service or your CEO blurted a stupid comment to the press. What separates the brands that survive and the ones that don’t is their response to bad press, especially in this fast-paced digital/social media age where 24 hours can make or break you. How do you put a lock on the situation to keep the public trust and your brand credibility (and resulting profits) from crumbling further?

Own Up To Your Mistakes Publicly

Back in 2009, two Domino’s Pizza employees thought it would be a hilarious idea to film themselves sticking cheese up their nose before putting it on a sandwich, spitting in food, and doing other unsanitary acts. Two days after it was posted on YouTube, it garnered more than a million views, and references to the video were in five out of 12 results on the first page of a Google search to Domino’s.

Twitter blew up on the incident and Domino’s was left wondering how they could gain back their customers’ trust. First, they posted an apology on their corporate website, and asked employees with Twitter accounts to link to it. Next, they created an official Twitter account @dpzinfo to reassure the public that the video was an isolated incident. They even had their USA president, Patrick Doyle apologize on YouTube.

Acknowledge What You Do Stand For

Domino’s Pizza USA President Patrick Doyle immediately thanked the online community for finding the video and tracking the store and its culprits down. He outlined steps about how they repaired the situation: firing the miscreants, sanitizing the store, and reexamining their hiring practices. He reaffirmed that Domino’s cares about food safety, clean stores, and producing high quality food.

Have An Emergency Plan

When a crisis happens, you definitely want to respond quickly. Domino’s took 48 hours to issue an official response on social media, although they had been alerted of the situation much earlier. Always be prepared with social media monitoring to gather positive press, but more importantly, to hunt down and respond to any negative feedback surrounding your brand. Have a crisis communications team work with your executives to identify and troubleshoot negative situations.

People can forgive a brand that will own up to their mistakes, take public steps to fix the situation (and improve it), and show that they really do care about their customers. If you ignore the situation, minimize it, or seem inauthentic (e.g. doing the ole “sorry you were offended” rather than “I’m sorry, this is wrong”), the haters of your brand will multiply, and your credibility will fade.

Written by Courtney Lee

Need help with your crisis communications plan? Contact us.

The Must List: The 5 Best Articles We Read This Week

Every day, we learn something new, gain insight, question the status quo or have a nice chuckle, thanks to so many articles out there on the Interwebz and beyond. Here’s our 5 favorite, must-read articles of the week:

SearchEngineLand founder Danny Sullivan posted this thoughtful analysis of Gigaom’s unfortunate demise with little hand-wringing or absurd speculation (like in a recent horrid Forbes bylined article that we won’t click to, but that claimed Gigaom failed because it was too ethical).

Nitasha Tiku is one of the best writers on Silicon Valley happenings (and we miss her at Valleywag). Of course she’d have a great piece on the Ellen Pao/Kleiner Perkins sexual harassment trial that has everyone in Silicon Valley at attention.

Want to know how to piss off a bunch of rich, powerful men? Just be Kevin Roose and write a fascinating article on why venture capital firms investing in their own startups is unethical! Whether you agree with Roose or not, he raises interesting questions and fuels a conversation that the tech industry should be having.

How do you get someone to read your article or blog post? Inc’s Larry Kim has the ultimate guide to writing click-worthy titles.

And finally, how could we not include Advertising Age’s Tim Peterson’s article on the acquisition of our client, Threshold Interactive, by Zealot Networks? Sure, we’re biased but it’s a mighty fine article that showcases Zealot’s bold vision.

Today Is A Good Day: Threshold Interactive Acquired by Zealot Networks

Our reaction to today's news — Our reaction to today’s news

Change Communications proudly congratulates our client Threshold Interactive on being acquired by former Maker Studios co-founder Danny Zappin’s Zealot Networks! Threshold has been recognized for their kickass work for brands including Butterfinger and Hot Pockets, and their creativity clearly caught Zealot’s eye. Just watch their hilarious video for Hot Pockets with Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg for further evidence.

As a small powerhouse, Threshold’s goal has been to grow, and this acquisition achieves that. However, Threshold has not forgotten what makes them so dynamic. Threshold’s CEO John Montgomery told AdAge “The first thing I tell clients is Threshold’s not changing, what this does is it makes us a much more powerful marketing partner for them. Now we’re plugged into the Zealot network, and our level of relationships [and] the tools and talent that we have to plug into from Zealot is a perfect complement to what we already do very well.”

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Threshold since 2012, and we’ve seen them earn success and recognition for their talent, including winning the AdAge Small Agency of the Year award in 2013, and cross their ten-year anniversary milestone last year. We look forward to toasting the next ten years with Threshold and Zealot. Read the rest of today’s news on AdAge.

Influencer Marketing 101

Influencer marketing has become a ubiquitous tactic that most brands want integrated into their PR or marketing strategy. It sounds simple enough – go after influential people in your brand’s industry and get them to spout niceties about your brand. Easy, right? Not quite. It takes a lot more than “hey, let’s get Ariana Grande to tweet about our blackhead remover!” in a brainstorm session.

Show Me the Money

Before you even start the brainstorming, make sure you have the budget (either for sponsorships or free product) to offer influencers. Relationships are based on mutual exchange. Respect an influencer’s social network by offering them something of value, like diapers/formula to a mommy blogger or free makeup samples to a beauty vlogger. You can’t get something for nothing.

Who Are You Selling To?

The next step is to know who your target audience is. If you sell adult diapers, Kim Kardashian isn’t going to be the right influencer for you. Don’t just shoe-horn in the most popular celebrity, and don’t just target celebrities. Once you’ve identified your target audience, find out where they live online. Is it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram? A quick search on those platforms targeting your brand’s keywords should tell you who the best influencers are. There are also plenty of paid services and networks that operate like talent agencies that can connect your brand to the right influencers so this is assuming that this experiment is a micro-budgeted DIY operation.

Now What Did I Get For All Of That?

Influencer marketing, like all things social media, is difficult to measure. If an influencer tweets about your business, and that tweet gets 5,000 retweets and 10,000 favorites, but you don’t see a spike in your business in the next month or two, how successful was that tweet for you? It all depends on what your goal is. If it’s brand awareness, then you’ve achieved that. If it’s a spike in sales, then re-strategize and investigate why that tweet didn’t generate what you wanted. Compare your social media metrics to your web traffic, and measure whether anything actionable is happening. It’s important to understand that influencer marketing is just one part of brand building and it all takes time to build toward the desirable outcome.

Don’t Forget Who Butters Your Bread

Your best influencers already exist – they are your customers. A customer’s stunningly ecstatic or depressingly negative endorsement of your product can lead to a domino effect among their connections. Make sure that you’re responsive in terms of social media engagement with your customers, and you’re treating your customers right.

Don’t Let The Numbers Fool You

Often, there’s far too much premium placed on the number of followers someone has. Let’s not forget that followers can easily be bought (which we wrote about here). Aim for true impact and engagement rather than the person with 10,000 (bot) followers. There’s too many services out there that lets you buy followers, and too many early adopters of platforms who quickly amassed followers.

Say “Thank You”

Reward your influencers- thank them, retweet them, promote what they’re promoting, scratch their back. The key to influencer marketing is to maintain that influencer relationship, and show them that you care. When you have happy influencers/customers, they’ll be overjoyed to share their enthusiasm about your product and brand. Case in point: Zappos, who has gotten rave reviews on their exceptional customer service and overnight delivery. As the saying goes, “happy wife equals happy life.” Keep your key influencers happy, and they’ll be sure to tell their connections that you’re a brand worth their money, energy and time.

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Warby Parker’s Fashionable Rise to Fame

If you’ve found yourself dreaming of gazing into Ryan Gosling’s beautiful eyes (and really, who hasn’t?), you’ll likely have to do it through his Warby Parker glasses. Warby Parker, the latest “IT” eyeglass brand, has perched its affordable yet fashion-forward specs on the noses of hipsters, value seekers and celebrities alike.

However, success didn’t happen overnight. How did Warby Parker transform from being a Wharton MBA class project to being named Fast Company’s #1 Most Innovative companies of 2015, usurping perennial favorites Google and Apple?

The cofounders of Warby Parker strategically spent money on only three things: 1) building out a website that they hired an external developer for, 2) the original set of inventory, 3) public relations. In Dave Gilboa’s (co-founder of Warby Parker) own words, “and the third was hiring a fashion publicist who was able to get us the meetings with the right people at GQ and Vogue. So we went in to pitch to them and got these great editorial features we really wanted – and a stamp of approval. GQ called us the ‘Netflix of eyewear.’ And we just started getting orders pouring in.” These orders grew so large that they had to create a waitlist functionality within the first day, and ended up having a 20,000 person waitlist that took them nine months to work through.

Besides having an obviously unique product, what did Warby Parker do right in terms of its marketing? Being bootstrapped for cash, they strategically used their marketing dollars for public relations, hiring someone who was able to get them an audience in front of top fashion influencers who loved their eyeglasses. Numbers don’t lie, especially a 20,000 person waitlist of people desperate to get their hands on Warby Parker eyeglasses.

When you’re a brand new startup, and need to get your brand in the eyes and mouths of your niche audience, spend money on public relations. It’ll get you farther than just listing your company and phone number on a blimp or a television spot. Having a great product plus the right marketing strategy equals growth for your startup.

By Courtney Lee

Thinking Beyond 15 Seconds: Brand Building In the Digital Age

So here’s a scenario: you just launched your new app, and to promote the launch, created a hilarious YouTube video featuring a hamster eating miniature food. Unexpectedly, your video gets shared by thousands of people, retweeted multiple times over, and becomes a top Facebook story. At current count, the video I mentioned – http://goo.gl/abf3fR – now has over 9 million views.

Now that your brand has created a viral sensation, what are you going to do when your 15 minutes of fame (more like 15 seconds in today’s hyper fast sharing world) are over?

Invest In PR

It’s awesome that you hit a lottery in terms of visibility on your first try, but to build momentum for your brand, invest in relationships with journalists, bloggers, influencers, and most importantly, a public relations strategy. Did your organic cat food ad strike the right chord with cat lovers? Make sure that cat outlets like Modern Cat and I Love Cats receive free samples so that they can write product reviews about your brand. Identify pet food websites that are on the first page of an “organic cat food search,” and reach out to them. You need to ensure that your brand is still in your relevant audience’s mind, once the viral wave has died down.

Don’t Let One Hit Wonders Define You

What do Pets.com’s 2000 Super Bowl commercial, The Knack’s “My Sharona,” and the directors of “The Blair Witch Project” have in common? Give up? They’re all one hit wonders. Pets.com notoriously overspent money on their 2000 Super Bowl commercial, only to collapse when the tech bubble popped. The Knack’s follow up albums never reached the commercial success that their “My Sharona” single hit. Finally, the directors of “The Blair Witch Project” haven’t found acclaim since their influential indie sensation. You don’t want your brand to pigeonhole itself on one successful ad, video, write-up, etc. To become successful, a brand can’t repeat a formula, or rest on the laurels of previous work.

Have a Consistent Message

Nike is the best example of consistency in its brand. When you think of Nike, you don’t think of just Michael Jordan, their spokesperson and Air Jordan inspiration. To their fans, Nike means rising above your limits, pushing yourself, and getting past failures to make that goal/shot/win. The “Just Do It” campaign features everyone from tennis champion Serena Williams, pop star Ellie Goulding, and soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. Nike has successfully stayed true to its brand by repeating a simple message: “What’s stopping you from being great? Just do it.” Here’s their 2008 commercial to drive home that point.

Create A Strong Product Line

This is the most important takeaway. Good marketing is nothing if it doesn’t have a strong product to back up the messaging. Don’t get overhyped by your own marketing success.Your product is the most important marketing tool that you have, and if your product isn’t up to snuff, all that PR will get you nowhere fast. Check out this ad by Goldieblox, a toy geared to teach young girls engineering skills. Great ad right? The ad is creative but also drives home the message that this product is different from the typical “girls toys” available right now, and can teach girls to be future inventors and engineers.

A brand needs tools to have staying power amid all the noise of social media and competition. To become and stay a memorable brand, you need to have: a strong product or product line, an authentic and consistent message, the ability to keep creating and not becoming known for just one thing, and investing in public relations strategies and relationships.

By Courtney Lee

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Netflix’s Amazing PR Turnaround

Remember when Netflix was mired in a massive backlash against their price hike and decision to rid their business of DVDs? Everyone (including us) thought that they were heading the way of MySpace and rendering themselves obsolete, thanks to a tone-deaf attitude to consumer demands and feedback.

Now, just 3 years later, Netflix is recording strong stock prices, winning industry awards and becoming the centerpiece of pop culture discussions with popular, buzz-worthy shows like “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards.” The streaming pioneers also had the smarts to bring back cult fave “Arrested Development” and are now moving into original films, signing deals with Adam Sandler (don’t hold that against them – the man is a cash cow) and becoming the distributors of the sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” news of which set off a firestorm in Hollywood.

It’s an impressive turnaround from a PR standpoint. The brand that was badly burned emerges triumphantly in three years. It’s a story that doesn’t happen often, especially since Netflix wasn’t yet too big to fail when the backlash was happening.

What Netflix did right:

Sticking to their guns – Some might argue that their stubborn inability to back down from negative feedback was their initial undoing but by not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and keeping CEO Reed Hastings’ vision, it appears Netflix made the right move.

Made their product so damn desirable, you had to sign back up – Great content is a helluva drug, and Netflix brilliantly pursued smart content, initially pursuing the small but vocal and influential fans of cult faves like “Arrested Development.” They then went guns blazing, signing expensive deals with talented people like David Fincher, Ryan Murphy and Jenji Kohan. Their latest deals combine the mainstream (Adam Sandler) with their artistic sensibilities (“Crouching Tiger” sequel and a new show from Tina Fey).

Diversified their product line – Instead of just becoming a content distributor, Netflix became a platform for original content, gambling on proven talent for not-so-proven content. The risk paid off in the form of increased user base and Emmy and Golden Globe award wins for their shows. Now, proven Hollywood talent look to Netflix the same way that they look to Sony, Lionsgate, Disney and Warner Bros.

Netflix’s strategy to focus on content that consumers simply couldn’t refuse isn’t reinventing the wheel but it was certainly risky, especially after stinging criticism. That risk seems to have paid off to the tune of $400 stock prices.

Ultimately, what Netflix’s brand turnaround tells you is: focus on the product and the positive PR will be inevitable.

Reflections on a PR Internship

Reflecting is the key to success. Avoiding criticizing what we’ve done in the past can push us to repeat the same mistakes. In teaching, it’s often said that reflecting is the means to growth, so that you can keep adapting to your students’ needs to ensure that they’re learning.

Continuous learning is a major theme of life. The adage “You learn something new every day” is true but I also believe that we repeat our mistakes at least once a week and in order to learn, we need to better identify our mistakes to improve them for the future. I guess that is also why I am majoring in history: to learn the mistakes of the past to make better decisions for the future.

My time here at Change Communications is coming to a close, but my learning will not. I’ve learned much during my internship, not with simple facts, but with skill.

The importance behind a coverage report for a client has always seemed null, until my role here. You can’t expect a client to pay you without demonstrating what you have done, and coverage reports do just that.

Media lists are tough to create, but one can get really creative with them. Being involved with the news really helps with this, and for me, my experience with the app SmartNews has really helped me. With SmartNews, I can refresh the app before leaving my house so that the top news of the day gets downloaded to my iPad for easy reading on the bus. Pocket also works wonders with this where you can save articles that you like, find important, or want to read later, even when you’re offline.

Lastly, what I think has helped me the most with this internship is being transparent and honest with my supervisor. I would always share every idea to her and was unfazed if she told me that my idea was not relevant to our client because I would learn why not. In doing so, I proved to both her and myself that I am capable of thinking outside of the box, in a realistic manner that could generate positive results. It is also hard to be critical at times, so starting out identifying what’s good about an idea works well to segue into criticism.

So here’s some advice for PR interns based on my experience:

Speak up – Its ok to express yourself, especially if you’re young like me, because we think very differently than people born even just 5 years earlier, and you should take advantage of this way of thinking.

Network – Get business cards so that when you have to go to a client event you can exchange them. I had the opportunity to do this with owners of major retailers and hotels in San Francisco and watched the opportunity go down the drain.

Quadruple Check Your Work and Tasks – When you have a task, keep referring back to it, and make sure that you are following what it says. Then before you hand it in, quadruple check it, and if you’re in the office, have a colleague read it. Turning in perfect work every time will make you stand out.

Be Where You Want To Be – If you are doing an unpaid internship and are not happy, leave. There are countless businesses that pay interns and treat them well while providing valuable growth. One should never feel stuck with an internship or any job that they are not happy with.

By Brian Liberman

Social Media Marketing Beyond Facebook

If this image is all too familiar to you as a brand marketer, it’s because Facebook has finally killed organic reach and the “free ride” is over for brands. This has been occurring for the past year so it should come as no surprise to anyone managing a Facebook page.

Originally, as businesses posted on their page, people who “liked” the page would get the business’ posts on their feed. This was organic, and companies had to get people to like them so that these users could see their post. Now, according to this Business Insider article, “the ad agency Ogilvy was reporting as far back as February of 2014 that only about 2% of users were seeing companies’ Facebook posts.” Essentially, Facebook has taken out what was organic about their site for businesses, and turned it into a money making machine. Like any advertising tactic, Facebook ads do well for some brands but not for others (Noah Kagan has an excellent, comprehensive post on how his Facebook ads have performed).

That’s why it’s critical to look toward other social media services to market your business, so that you’re not completely dependent on Facebook and its whims (this goes for any platform). Forbes recently published “Social Media Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2015” and it predicts that Twitter’s new business advertising model will increase in popularity, Instagram will become essential for image-based social media marketing and social media marketing will finally be embraced as a core pillar of content marketing.

While Facebook once hooked its users (and still does), many younger users are beginning to move away from Facebook and turn to other social media platforms: Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, even Ello have emerged to steal away the hearts and minds (and ad dollars) of youths.

With new platforms come new concerns, but sometimes, being the first to market on a platform can push sales. Universal Pictures stated that millions of people viewed their first Snapchat ad for the film “Ouija” and FOX released a 6-second “tweaser” on Vine for “Wolverine.” Both engagements were successful for the films in reaching a younger (under-25) demographic.

Ultimately, brands and marketers need to stay on the forefront of what their audience do on their free time. Fads come and go, so brands need to keep up and play along with them by being present on many platforms and open to new opportunities. In doing so, if one rises or falls, your business will thank you for not only being on Facebook.

By Brian Liberman

The Holidays in Union Square SF: A Brighter Celebration

It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time of the year when you get all those advertisements about Black Friday, when you scour online forums to find the perfect deal, when you can enjoy the winter season with a cozy cup of hot cocoa, caroling, decorations, and a two block open pedestrian-friendly plaza in the heart of San Francisco, Union Square – wait, that’s new!

San Francisco has always known how to be festive. From the outdoor ice skating rink, to the humongous Christmas tree in front of Macy’s, Union Square has been an international holiday destination that brings thousands into the city each year. This year, Union Square decided to change its traditional pace.

From November 28th to December 31st, the central subway construction will stop and astroturf will cover the streets for Winter Walk SF where two blocks of Stockton Street will be open for pedestrians only. Winter Walk will have caroling, demos, live music, and other surprises as well as be illuminated by an impressive light art show projected on the Macy’s Men’s Building featuring Jack Frost’s adventures as he spreads festive icicles throughout San Francisco. As an added bonus, Off the Grid food trucks will be there every other day of the week (M, W, F, Sunday) to help show off SF’s great food truck culture.

For more information on Winter Walk SF head over to WinterWalkSF.com and we hope to see you there!

By Brian Liberman