Strategically Communicating

If you think about current campaigns, either local or national, which ones do you believe are the most successful and why?  They can be product launches or branding, awareness, educational, promotional, advertising, or any other sort of campaigns.  Please share your thoughts by Monday morning!  Thanks!

Pinterest is catching on fast!  Have you guys seen this?

http://pinterest.com/prnews/

Earlier this year, McDonalds launched a paid placement Twitter campaign with the hashtag #meet the farmers. Clicking on the hashtag took you to videos of some of their farmers growing “real food, born of the earth.” Their intent was to encourage people to think “healthy” when they thought of McDonald’s.

Later that day McDs moved the conversation to #McDStories and everything turned south, with thousands of people tweeting about horrible things people have seen at McDs and other bashing of the fast food chain. This lasted about two hours until McDs pulled the hashtag.

“Walk up to any random person in the U.S. (or world for that matter) and say, ‘Did you know that McDonald’s uses farm-fresh meats?’ and they would probably laugh at you and call you nuts,” says Jason Falls, from  SocialMediaExplorer.com. “Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. McDonald’s in this case had no idea what their true perception in the marketplace was. They didn’t see their brand the way consumers did. So when they tried to portray their brand as something it wasn’t, at least from a perception standpoint, they got dinged.”

John Furnari, Blitz digital marketing, said that the company probably didn’t get the character of many Twitter users. “They were picturing some wholesome American family talking about memorable moments in their lives going as a group to get a burger,” Furnari says. “In truth though, is that your typical Twitter user?”

Was this corporate arrogance, ignorance, wishful thinking, or a case of not doing their research?

iframe>Milk Message

Speaking of milk. There seems to be a strategic communications plan behind this and it is fascinating.

This started as a comment to Sara’s last post, but I thought I should share it here too. I know there are divergent schools of thought regarding the ethics of PR. When I decided to go into PR I only knew of two people who did it. One was a publicist for a large PBS studio. The other was her friend who worked for a nuclear power plant. I knew I would never be the right person for the job of covering something up and pursued my study with high ideals. I received affirmation of my ideals and the changing world when the PR guy (can’t remember his name) from PGE came and spoke to a class I was in. He shared a campaign and how the PR function at PGE guided operations based on public sentiment. PGE went to extensive lengths to work with environmental groups and agencies to ‘do the right thing’.  They were able to determine that the added cost in front, (and it was huge) would save them money over the long term. This is so often the case. I see my work as helping people in an organization take the long view and saying to people on the inside what everyone is saying about them outside.

This week for my topic, I analyzed bareMinerals’ Force of Beauty campaign efforts at increasing consumer awareness around the nature of real beauty versus the media’s portrayal of beauty. Within the analysis, I uncovered a possible topic for a crisis communications plan. I learned that while running the campaign, Bare Escentuals ran into a major crisis. What do you do when the platforms through which you have contracted media buys run your advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show, during the same episode in which he laments women who buy contraception as, (pardon me as I quote here), “whores”. Eeek! What a disaster! How do you plan for that?!