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.

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.

Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

…Read More…

Over at the Master New Media blog Robin Good has an interesting article about how brands can leverage the credibility of online personalities in a fair and open way.

Good says that The Brand Ambassador should be a “respected followed authority, a blogger or small publisher targeting a specific audience niche” and points out that having an ambassador can be a much more effective vehicle for marketing communication that the most expensive advertising campaign.

Snipped from Good’s article:

We do not trust brands anymore. We trust individuals: friendly, familiar authority figures with who we feel great affinity. These are the people we trust and those from which we would always welcome honest suggestions and tips, and when they are spontaneous or clearly disclosed even those of commercial nature.

When you get paid to be a sponsor, you are a passive vehicle sending off a message to an audience that has no way to respond, comment or talk back to you publicly. There are no checks and balances in place to verify your claims and credibility. You just get more popular and visible by selling yourself as a testimonial while you lose little or none of your credibility as everybody knows that it is all fake, staged, unreal.

The piece is well worth a read and — bonus! — Good has included some great photos too.

-Arthur

A few years ago, we helped Dr. Romanelli develop and implement the international marketing program for a co-branded product line he was doing with Jaeger-LeCoultre. The idea was to excite influencers, reach tomorrow’s luxury watch buyers, and get today’s buyers into the shops….around the world. Judging from the amount of global press coverage, traffic to the campaign site, and some spot checks at retailers where the watches sold-out, the project succeeded.

So we were happy to see this week that JLC is continuing with this PR/marketing strategy, making it happen with a fascinating and beautiful production collaboration with Marc Newson. It’s a good roadmap for how an old luxury brand can get the message out that it is fresh and relevant:

• Browsing daily newsletter from CoolHunting.com

• See a blurb on a new Jaeger-LeCoultre/Mark Newson collaboration (via Watchismo)

• Remember that JLC has a history of surprising product collaborations with artists

• Notice that the collaboration seems true to the JLC brand and technology

• Follow a link to the JLC site to see what else they’re doing. …Read More…