Selling socks with whimsy: Tabio
October 25, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I was quite enchanted by the recently launched Tabio UK interactive website. It was sweet, whimsical, and endearing, but most of all, it reignited a nostalgic childhood fascination and playfulness around a normally rather benign, everyday product: socks. The best part about the site was the wonderful blend of emotive playfulness with the barely noticeable transactional capabilities of the site. Increasingly, I think this blend of feel-good emotive integration into the buying and selling process is the norm.
The Guy At Home in His Underwear: Raising awareness for testicular cancer
October 16, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On October 6th, Stanfield launched “The Guy at Home in His Underwear” with the help of John St, Hard Citizen, and The Secret Location. The campaign is focused on raising awareness for testicular cancer, featuring Mark, the Guy at Home, wearing nothing but his skivvies on live camera feeds all day long. For every person who “likes” the campaign through Facebook, Stanfield’s will donate $1, up to a maximum of $25,000 to the Canadian Cancer Society.
From Day 1, the campaign took off. Within the first day, thousands gave their support by “liking” the Guy at Home in his Underwear. Since then, the campaign has gathered over 35,000 Facebook likes, managing to reach the 25,000 like and $25,000 donation goal within the first week. Stanfield’s decided to put up another $25,000 for the remainder of the campaign. Smart thinking, Stanfield’s! Since then, it seems every few hours, a few thousand more people jump in to like the campaign.
So why the huge uptake? With all the companies clamouring to “do digital” and to be the next viral sensation, what has set this campaign apart from some others that have not have met the same success? « Read the rest of this entry »
Great expectation management: Real time updates for the anxious customer
August 7, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I went to throw a quick update up on my posterous blog this morning, and came across the message below on their site.
I actually had not been aware of the scheduled maintenance that was to occur, but upon being informed, understood and had no real reaction. (Contrary to my confused reaction and subsequent post a few months ago when the JustMeans website went down. To be fair, that was not a scheduled maintenance, but all the more reason and need for effective communication.)
Posterous did a very good job in keeping the page clean and the message abundantly simple. The call to action for me, the customer, was clear: if I wanted real time updates, I should go to their Twitter stream. The main message was also very clear: a scheduled maintenance was underway, the site was temporarily down and would be back up and running as soon as they were done. I noted that the estimated time of completion for the scheduled maintenance had actually been 2AM PDT, but didn’t bother doing the time conversion for my timezone immediately. I went straight to Twitter. « Read the rest of this entry »
Communication principles in a crisis: Be transparent. Be informative. Be timely.
March 25, 2010 § 1 Comment
Sometimes, when things take an unexpected negative side-turn, the instinctive reaction may be not to say anything. In the age of digital, it’s more critical than ever to speak. Be transparent. Be informative. Be timely.
If you don’t speak, someone else will speak for you.
Yesterday, the JustMeans social site focused on corporate social responsibility went down. For any user going to the site, a large “server cannot be found” error page greeted you. The site was down for an extended period of time. (See the screen capture below.)
As the company is strongly rooted in digital, the absence of the website meant that the primary corporate presence and channel of communication with users was missing. In my personal bewilderment, I went on to check the next best thing: Twitter. JustMeans has a number of active twitter accounts – surely they would mention what had happened there.
Silence. All of the tweets were the regular CSR-related updates and interesting tidbits of what was happening around the world in the realm of CSR. However, not a single tweet mentioned or answered the critical question. Where did the website go? In the end, instead of hearing from JustMeans when I tweeted to the Twitterverse the question, I heard back within the hour from someone else. The JustMeans account had been suspended for spam and abuse…
Really? Something didn’t seem right here. In the meantime, the tweet and the explanatory site was getting picked up and passed around.
In the end, after almost twenty-four hours, the answer came back through Twitter in a direct mail. There had been a security breach to the server company, and the site had been taken down as a precaution. Sounds reasonable. I wrote back to say thank you – and failed. (The account was not following me, therefore all direct messages were blocked, which is a whole other conversation on social media communication.)
The good news story here is that not too much damage was done. I have always been a supporter of JustMeans and I still am. The tweets posted about the site being down were not in the hundreds, and now, the site is back up – almost without anyone noticing… but then again, perhaps people not noticing isn’t such a good thing?
Yes but, where can I buy that?
March 14, 2010 § 3 Comments
I was recently looking for a Massimo Dutti location as my favorite wool coat is starting to show the tell-tale signs of the years I have enjoyed it. In the time since I bought the coat, I have relocated back to Canada, and for the life of me have no clue as to whether there’s even a Massimo Dutti retail store here. Upon diving into their website, I was dismayed to find that although there is a very comprehensive country list upfront that you must choose your location from, when you actually get into the site, their actual stores are nowhere to be found. (It would also appear that your country selection doesn’t have any impact on the content you see whatsoever, which also begs to question – why force the extra step that adds no value to me in the first place? But I digress.)
The lack of, at the absolute least, a low-fidelity global list of store locations feels like a significant miss. It seems so obvious to say, but for every piece of communication, it’s important to consider what the overall purpose is. What you want people to think and potentially do in reading or accessing that website, email, brochure, newsletter, etc. I’m sure for most retailers, they’d love for people to fall in love with something, and go find it at the store to buy. In the case of Massimo Dutti – with the exception of certain cities where they have more prominence – potential customers would just leave and forget. A lost sale.
In the end, I stumbled onto an obscure unrelated wiki that happened to mention a Toronto shopping mall with a listing of all their stores. Luckily, Massimo Dutti was one of the stores listed. Unluckily, upon traveling there, it would seem that the store was closed more than a year ago. So, it would seem that the trail has turned cold until Massimo Dutti writes back to my inquiry on a store location. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how promising that will be as it’s already been over a week since my original contact – which is a whole other discussion.
