Last week, online retail behemoth Amazon received the kind of PR boost that any brand outside the Republican Party would kill for: President Obama visited its massive Chattanooga warehouse and used his media megaphone to promote the company for creating jobs fit for every politician’s favorite fallback character: the “middle class” American.

This is all well and good, but Amazon’s recent reputation management challenges are far more complicated…and less complimentary.

The real purpose of the President’s visit was to propose a bargain between the two political parties in which he would trade a cut in corporate tax rates for increased government investment in “education, training, and public works projects” designed to facilitate the creation of those precious middle class jobs. The event unsurprisingly attracted critiques of both the company and the President that highlight their unique PR struggles.

It’s true that Amazon’s planned hiring wave will create as many as 7,000 American jobs, but Obama’s visit raised several questions that the company would rather not address:

• Are these jobs truly “middle class?”
• Is Amazon the sort of company that will help strengthen the American economy at large?
• Will this PR stunt facilitate any truly meaningful political activity?

That’s easy: no, no, and…no.

Read more

Facebook’s latest plan to convince brands and advertisers that its services have some real-world value involves utilizing the endless data collected via users’ adventures beyond their own accounts.

In other words, Zuck and company’s new aggregation partners will collect info about what users do when they’re not scrolling through their newsfeeds so the ‘book can better tailor ads to relevant audiences and convince more clients to pay for exposure. Yes, the faceless Big Data-bot wants to know which books you bought on Amazon, which shows you watch on Hulu and which restaurants you like on Yelp and Seamless — because it’s all about those cookies. Identifying data will be scrambled, so your names won’t be revealed. But still: New World Order, One World Government, cats marrying dogs, yadda yadda. We’re all doomed.

As All Things D‘s Peter Kafka observed yesterday, this sounds a whole lot like what Google and other companies have been doing for years. So now brands have two options: they can promote themselves the Facebook way by shoving sponsored stories in your face or they can use outside data to reach target audiences like everyone else. They can also do both and compare the data.

More options are a good thing! But will this move make Facebook more valuable for clients and users? We’re pretty tired of seeing sponsored posts that don’t interest us at all, so we’ll say maybe.

“Showrooming” is a relatively new phenomenon in the retail world, but it appears to be growing. It’s basically the act of visiting a physical store, checking out the prices on the items you want, then buying them online for less. (We assume celebrities hire people to do this sort of thing, but what do we know.)

So customers walk around stores armed with their smartphones, checking to make sure they can get that TV or iPad a little cheaper on Amazon. It’s a big deal for retailers because, of course, their ultimate goal to encourage browsers to actually buy stuff. And they’re dealing with it in different ways.

Best Buy, for example, rolled out a promo campaign to combat “showrooming” by promising consumers that it would match or beat the price offered by local and online retailers for every product in stock. Bold move, but this week Reddit users found an Australian specialty foods retailer with an even more brazen approach: charging customers $5 just to browse.

Frankly, we don’t think this approach will work. It implies that the retailer simply doesn’t trust the public — which is a terrible PR move. If it were a high-end store then charging visitors $5 to look around might make sense. But don’t most people visit the Gucci store just to browse anyway? It’s not like anyone can actually afford that stuff.

Here’s an interesting fact: 30% of top brands now have “dedicated customer service Twitter handles”. This makes perfect sense, right? Customers value great service above all else, they love the instant gratification of social media and they really, really hate waiting for reps to pick up the phone. Also: by establishing separate Twitter handles for customer service, brands can “divert negative attention and activity” away from the primary feed.

So what goes into running a great customer service operation in the twittersphere? In order to find out, we poked around and found ten examples of brands that are doing it right, starting with some of the biggest.

1. Nike Support: This one is pretty much the gold standard. A quick glance at the account with all replies shows you how quickly and how often the feed’s managers respond to individual customers.

@karolharvill Please take a look at the following FAQ for best practices on calibrating workouts with the app: gonike.me/6019ndnS

— Nike Support (@NikeSupport) March 7, 2013

2. Xbox Support: Xbox boldly claims to hold the Guinness World Record for “most responsive Twitter feed”–and based on the number of replies their team posts every minute, we can see why they make that claim.

@kona570 This what you’re looking for? xbx.lv/mWsFJy^KC

— Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) March 7, 2013

Read more

If there’s one trend we’d like to kill deader than the Harlem Shake, it’s “Keep Calm and Carry On”. Now comes news that will hopefully mark the end of this meme: Amazon is in a big pot of extra-hot PR water after briefly carrying a series of T-shirts bearing charming slogans like “Keep Calm and Hit Her”, “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and the winner, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot.”

We think we speak for everyone when we say “Yikes.”

Here’s the dish: over the weekend, said shirts appeared on the site via a super classy Australian third-party retailer known as Solid Gold Bomb which has partnered with Amazon in the past. A public uproar quickly followed, with Britain’s shadow culture secretary calling on Amazon to make an immediate and “substantial” donation to a refuge for abused women. Amazon quickly removed the pages, but as you can see from the image above, screenshots live forever..

Read more

Gamification: it’s a relatively new buzzword, but you’ve probably been hearing a lot about it lately. Why? Because it’s now clear that digital games go well beyond your XBox and Farmville accounts. All kinds of brands can use games to promote their products: here, for example, Edelman PR‘s Robert Phillips discusses the firm’s success creating a digital bar distraction for popular rum brand Captain Morgan.

And companies don’t just use gamification to entertain customers and familiarize them with a brand–it can help them develop better products and figure out exactly what the public wants from them in the first place. We recently had the chance to chat with Julie Wittes Schlack, SVP of Innovation and Design at Communispace, to figure out how they help brands like Kraft, State Farm, Citigroup and Comcast develop better products and marketing campaigns with simple betting games known as “prediction markets.”

How does the public see “gamification”? Do they distinguish it from traditional video games? 

Read more

We can all agree that promoting books is a difficult and often thankless job complicated by the public’s rapid move away from paper and toward the digital model (which is less profitable but more efficient and far more agreeable to spouses who really don’t care for the dust and clutter of a big bookshelf).

For authors and publishers alike, the very ability to claim “bestseller” status can significantly increase sales in addition to related speaking and consulting fees (especially relevant if you write about business). Unfortunately, it seems that more authors are now responding to the PR and financial challenges of writing for a living by simply buying their way onto bestseller lists.

Here’s how it works: The Wall Street Journal outs a marketing firm called ResultSource which buys thousands of copies of books in bulk before their publication dates to create a false “sales bounce” and then returns them to the seller. (All for a significant fee, of course.)

Can you guess how we feel about this practice?

Read more

We understand that networks, cable companies, etc., are struggling to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of online video. Viewers are increasingly demanding that their favorite shows be available to watch whenever and wherever they want, redefining make-or-break factors like ratings and advertising.

So we don’t really mind watching ads while streaming videos on sites like Hulu, as long as it means we don’t have to miss trivia night at the local bar in order to catch the next episode of The Following.

But when we purchase an episode via Amazon or iTunes, our expectations, it seems, are entirely different.

After watching a recently purchased episode of Archer (an FX show) via our boyfriend’s Amazon account, we noticed that fellow fans had given it a surprisingly low rating. Curious, we read through the comments section only to find that every single negative comment concerned the ads for other FX shows that preceded the video.

Here are a few of the angrier comments:

Read more

Here’s a controversy that isn’t quite as blatant and ridiculous as the one surrounding Anthropologie‘s super-racist candlestick but still serves as an interesting case study in badly planned promotional campaigns.

The National Entertainment Collectibles Assocation (NECA), a company that makes toy lines based on film properties, recently decided to pull a line of action figures based on Quentin Tarantino‘s current spaghetti western/slave revolt blockbuster Django Unchained. Why? Because most of the black characters are slaves–and some of the white ones are slave masters. This didn’t sit so well with some.

We haven’t seen the movie and we don’t want to get into the debate over the film’s very liberal use of “the n-word”, but we are a little baffled by the very concept of toy lines from a Tarantino film (though we wouldn’t mind having a little 7-inch version of Tim Roth’s Reservoir Dogs character on our desk).

Read more

2012 was a year of recovery for Netflix; the world’s top streaming service lost a fair number of subscribers after the late-2011 Qwikster debacle and the pricing bump that came along with it. While Netflix made the right move with a backstep and an apology, we argued in a guest post that the damage done to the brand would probably be permanent.

There’s little doubt that the company’s star is dimmer today than it once was–we’ve considered dropping the service and sticking with Hulu and Amazon–but the folks in red still rule the streaming game, and some think that a newly passed bill allowing the company to expand its partnership with Facebook will cement its status as top dog for some time.

Long story short: after ideological opponents leaked Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental record to the press, Congress passed a 1988 law making it harder to share one’s viewing history with the public. Now that the law has been updated, we’ll see some changes to the Netflix model in 2013. But how will they change our perception of the brand?

We’re not sure exactly how the new features will work, but we know users will now have the power to share viewing, renting and rating histories with the public and recommend individual titles to Facebook friends. Company policy will also allow users to “withdraw consent whenever they want on a ‘video-by-video’ basis”, which is good–we want Netflix to give us accurate recommendations, but we don’t want our moms or our friends to know that we watched a Kathy Griffin stand-up special and enjoyed it.

Read more