Ready, Shoot, Aim

In this era of Twitter and Instagram, there is considerable pressure on companies and brands to be timely and topical and try to grab their share of the viral madness of a given issue.  In this era of citizen journalists and a smart phone in many pockets, companies and brands are compelled to try to be the first out of the gate with a comment about a topic.  It is a Ready, Shoot, Aim culture.

The truth is, however, many companies end up doing much more harm then good to their brands  when they display their clumsiness or cultural insensitivity through a poorly written or ill-timed tweet or post.  The chances of this happening go up exponentially when a company is focusing more on timeliness (we want to be the first to comment on this) than appropriateness.

Occasionally a company hits a home run.  Ironically, a perfect example of a company hitting a home run is the tweet that Oreo sent during last year's Super Bowl.  When the power went out and most of us were growing weary of listening to the announcers try to fill an unexpected long period of time, the marketing team for Oreo was working hard and effectively.  They came up with a simple, brilliant, topical tweet.  You can see that tweet here and at the end of this blog.  It was funny.  It was inoffensive.  It filled the time while millions of people were waiting for the Super Bowl to start again.  It got retweeted over and over again.  It went viral.  Opportunities like the Super Bowl power outage are rare. Companies being ready to take advantage of those rare opportunities are even rarer.  Oreo was the company that took the best advantage of that opportunity.  They are still enjoying the benefits, as people like me continue to talk about it and share the tweet.

But it is not easy to do this.  Many companies, trying to be quick-witted or topical or edgy, end up sounding tone deaf, insensitive and just plain nasty.  Take for example, the ads for Blush Lingerie connecting their underwear to Edward Snowden uncovering things.  You can find these slightly NSFW ads here.  The ads are not that funny and somewhat tone deaf.

It also seems as if some marketers can't resist joining in on a world event that is garnering lots of attention.  For example, consider the tweet by Kennith Cole, a clothing designer of some renown, who tweeted ""Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC"  His next tweet, 2 hours later, was an apology about making light of a "serious situation."

Every marketer dreams of doing what Oreo did in the Super Bowl.  To a marketer, it is like hitting a walk off home run in the World Series.  But (as I totally overuse this sports analogy) every home run hitter says you strike out a lot before you hit a home run.  The trick is to make sure your strike outs don't do serious damage to your brand.  The trick is to make sure your misses are simply misses and not culturally or socially insensitive to the point of being all people remember about your brand.  The trick is to tie your brand to an event that is easier to make jokes about, like the Super Bowl, rather than one in which people are killed and maimed, like Arab Spring or the Boston bombing.

Finally, and I think most important, it is more important when using social media to tie your brand to current events to take a bit of extra time to get your message right.  No one is talking about who had the first advertising tweet tied to the Super Bowl power outage.  Rather, they are talking about the brand who got everything right.  The brand who took the time to aim before they shot!