Back in January, the famous Australian wine brand [yellow tail] chose to donate $100,000 to the US Humane Society. As part of the “[tail] for tails” program launched by the brand, the donation aimed at demonstrating Yellow Tail’s commitment to rescue animals in peril.

But this move made American farmers, as well as consumers, upset, as the HSUS is opposed to factory farming and is allegedly using donations for political lobbying, rather than rescuing animals in peril.

How the crisis started:

Users poured angry comments all over the brand’s Facebook page. Troy Hadrick, a 5th-generation farmer from South Dakota,  resorted to YouTube to voice his disagreement, gathering more than 11,800 viewers to date.

Then, the discussion spilled to Facebook and Twitter. An alternate Facebook Page, Yellow Fail, gathered nearly 3,900 fans (vs. 2,200 for Discover Yellow Tail), while a #yellowfail hashtag provided buzz opportunities on Twitter.

How did Yellow Tail addressed the crisis?

Listening to consumers, yellow tail posted an official response on Feb 4th. Here is an extract:

We’ve listened to your recent feedback and it was very helpful to us – in fact it prompted us to specifically choose the areas where we’d most like to celebrate animals. Here’s what we’ve decided: We’ll still honor our monetary commitment to the HSUS, but now we are specifically directing our $100,000 donation to HSUS’ Animal Rescue Team, which launch on-the-ground missions to rescue animals in peril [...] We may not always agree with 100 percent of what an organization represents, but rescuing animals displaced from natural disasters is a cause we support.

Nevertheless, even if farmers and consumers are praising yellow tail for finally addressing their concerns, negative comments are still posted everyday. This shows such a crisis is extremely difficult to manage, and may entail consequences for weeks, if not months, to come. It might be interesting to know how much this breach in brand image has affected sales.

What lessons can we learn from this case?

If a brand wants to donate to a cause, it must do more research about who to donate to. Even if it’s a good cause, it doesn’t mean that the organization you are donating to doesn’t have foes. And if it has, why, who are they, and are they part of your consumer base and/or able to influence your audience?

For a wine brand, donating to an organization that is at war with the farming community is pretty dangerous. Vine growing and winemaking are also linked to agriculture. And the same goes for wine consumption: wine goes well with food, and wine pairs beautifully with meat.

A case study demonstrating the influence of the farmers’ community online

One of the most interesting facts in the Yellow Tail case is how the farmers community has been able to create a platform for a new conversation out of this accident. This shows a real shift in habits, interactions and use of technology, showing how new target audiences - namely the farmers community - have emerged online.

In fact, the Yellow Tail case gave a real opportunity for farmers, who were able to successfully use technology to rally consumer voices to their cause, leveraging Facebook, Twitter, industry sites and blogs to create a movement.

Too often I hear “I’m too busy. I need more time. I’m tired of junk,” when friends are describing the Internet and its endless possibilities.

I implore you to simply change the paradigm and let the “power of the Internets” come to you.

With an hour’s worth of work and a valid email address, you web surfers can get experts, tastemakers and style gurus working for you.

Google is SO yesterday. Thanks to brands getting smarter about their offerings, gone are the days I have to go searching the web.

My bevy of smartly written, interesting and well-curated email newsletters provides me all the news and info that’s relevant to my world, in one place.

Today, I don’t have to go in search of content. The information I want comes to me.

News? NYTimes has a PDF of the day’s top headlines in my inbox when I awake, keeping me up to date on current events.

Sports? ESPN will blast you alerts of your favorite team’s final box score as soon as the

Culture? Between a blend of Daily Candy, Urban Daddy, Thrillist and relatively new addition, Very Short List from media mogul Jared Kushner, I’m up to date on what’s happening in town and around the world.

Setup time: 1 hour.

Daily perusal: 5 to 15 minutes.

With a little upfront care to manage my preferences at choice outlets and selecting the right newsletters, I’m armed with enough information everyday for lunch and dinner conversation and perhaps a new book, movie or designer to check out.

All without having to leave the comfort of my inbox.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics have a three-hour delay?  Why not check out the Olympic Twitter Tracker on NBC.com?  As an interesting, real-time visual representation of Twitter discussions regarding the Olympic games, the tweets and photo proportions constantly shift depending on the volume of discussion on Twitter.

The Olympic Twitter Tracker, a collaboration between NBC and San Francisco’s Stamen Design, “showcases reactions with an authenticity and passion that can only come straight from the fans and athletes,” writes Twitter’s Chloe Sladden on the Twitter blog.

“So many of us want to experience the full richness of an event, television show, or news story,” Sladden wrote. “Increasingly, this means participating in it, and then seeing that very participation reflected in the event itself.”

Check out the video:

It may be a cheap shot to kick Maclaren strollers when they’re down, but the amputated finger storm that made it all the way to the Financial Times this week is a textbook example of why an active ongoing social media program is an essential facet of any good PR/marketing strategy.

By participating in the online conversation — having a company blog that is informative on issues important to parents (say, safely transporting children), or by contributing to customer sites, blogs and forums tangentially related to Maclaren products – the company would have been a bit less tone deaf and flat-footed in the face of such sensational news.

The FT does a good job today in “How Not To Take Care of a Brand” by John Gapper of detailing the missteps: ranging from delayed and insufficient reaction to complaints in the US (but not in other markets) to twittering and posting crisis/recall-specific pages that turned out to be dead links.

Know thy customer: “Anything relative to child safety tends to be off-the-charts viral,” says Pete Blackshaw, a brand consultant for Nielsen Online. According to Blackshaw’s data, new mothers are three times more likely than others to use social media and start blogs. “Given the higher order of sensitivity, parents are much more diligent,” says Blackshaw. “They want to talk to friends, family and even strangers about their decisions. They’ll go the extra distance.” Yahoo News

A pervasive product being used by such a connected and impassioned customer-base is usually the Holy Grail for a brand — and a strategic ongoing social media program is certainly essential for getting there. Maclaren shows us one other reason to be engaged and in-touch online: it can also help a brand withstand the riptide popular discontent.

Kudos to Liz Bastiaanse Hamren on her AdAge “CMO Strategy” interview that came out today.  Great comments on the role of PR, Channel Marketing….and CreativeFeed!

When it comes to launching consumer technology products, Liz is a consummate pro. We’re thrilled with the work we’ve done together over the past year. And mentioning us in her AdAge interview was not bad.

Ad Age: Had Plantronics focused much on consumer marketing before? And was that the challenge?

Ms. Hamren: The marketing challenge is to communicate effectively how good the products work…We what we wanted to do was communicate to a broader audience how good those products are. This is why I brought in Creative Feed as an agency because I felt like they strategically got what we were doing, and they could also execute in a really fast way. That’s what we needed — that bridge between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.

Ad Age: So you hired the agency and then created a marketing campaign?

Ms. Hamren: We developed the messaging for both of the two new products, and to give you some context, Plantronics launched two products into the high-end [of the headset market] at the same time. The first, the Voyager Pro, launched in April as a performance product. We developed a video used for both consumers and retailers and created channel-marketing collateral from end caps to shippers that communicated the message that this product was engineered for sound quality. The marketing is all about bringing out the science behind the product.

Then we launched the Discovery 975 in August, and that was at the other end of the spectrum in the premium space — a product meant to be the essence of technology and design. We created a campaign called “Ingeniously Simple.” It has amazing audio quality, but in a much smaller and more discreet form factor that’s easier to take on and off.

They’re both high-end products at $99 and above. We divided the whole market by people who only care about performance, and so here is this form factor, battery life and speaker designed to be worn all day. And then for other people who still want a high-end headset, but want it to be more discreet, easier to take on and off, for them, we have this other product. [Then] the two don’t cannibalize each other. It’s been an interesting strategy to take the high-end part of the market and segment it this way.

Ad Age: How do you figure out the media mix for a niche tech brand like Plantronics? It’s obviously not a “Desperate Housewives” TV buy, but what is it?

Ms. Hamren: The two things to really focus on are public relations and channel marketing. These decisions are made at retail, so it’s about working closely with channel products where the product is sold to create great campaigns with them at retail. Everything from promotions and shippers and great creative in all the channels, whether that’s Best Buy, Radio Shack, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile stores, and then also online, where Amazon is a big channel for us.

“Following a new RFP, The CIVB (Bordeaux Wine Council) has chosen CreativeFeed and Selavi, two agencies located in New York City, to manage the promotion of its wines in the USA and Canada from 2009 to 2011. CreativeFeed will direct Bordeaux’s interactive marketing campaigns for a total annual budget of $1.33 million. On the other hand, Selavi will manage Bordeaux’s events calendar.”

It pains me to see when brands spend tons of $$$ on expensive media launch budgets, only to overlook the actual in-store experience. This great article from Jon Fine at BusinessWeek helps sum up some recent attention to completing the sales chain.  http://tinyurl.com/nbow5e

Arthur adds his two cents in his posted response:

“This trend is not new but in recent years Silicon valley understood better that your customer or sales force can and will become the most powerful brand evangelist. That pushed every brand to start thinking differently on how to launch their product or even present /design their own offering…innovation resides also in the way you go to market a big media buy is great if you can afford it otherwise focus on the last mile when launching your product the return can be much more powerful.”