We interrupt your regularly scheduled #FollowFriday to bring you the Kenneth Cole Twitter fiasco. Typically I would wait until Monday to write about it, but it’s unfolding as I write this and it’s too important to wait. Plus…it’s a PR nightmare and you all know how much I love a good crisis!
But, first. Allow me to tell you a story about Habitat, the furniture company based in the U.K.
In July 2009, they hired an intern to help them with their social media efforts. And the intern, rightfully so, thought he/she would look at the trending topics to see if there was something he/she could use in tweets.
Turns out there was. And it was big!
The company began tweeting a chance to win a gift card (worth about $2,000) with a link to some pretty juicy news… the deadly protests in Iran after the disputed presidential election. Bad enough in its own right. But they used the hashtag #mousavi, so when people were searching for information on the protests, they instead found the Habitat contest. To say people were angry is putting it mildly. And Habitat was put on serious defense.
Now. Fast forward 18 months and another well-known brand has made the same mistake.
Yesterday morning we had a Project Jack Bauer team meeting and, when I got back to my desk, Sean McGinnis had DM’d me a tweet from Kenneth Cole. Thinking he was trying to get on my good side and sending me a shoe sale, I clicked on it (he called me Gumby on Facebook and I threatened to egg his house – don’t ask).
What I found, instead, is the tweet below.
Um. What? Using what’s happening in Egypt to promote your new spring collection? Seriously?
I know a lot of people will argue that this did exactly what the company intended – to get us all talking. And others will say I’m playing into that strategy by blogging about it. And others will say there is no such thing as bad PR.
But there is such a thing as bad PR. Even if Kenneth Cole, himself, posts a mea culpa.
This is a perfect example of why Spin Sucks. People have a horrible perception of the PR industry because of crap like this. And that’s what it is. C-R-A-P.
Public relations is meant to build awareness that drives sales. It is not meant to build awareness for the sake of people saying your name. Or blogging about you. Bad PR is BAD PR. It’s not good.
Maybe it won’t hurt sales. Maybe some people will be grateful to be reminded of how much they love his shoes and clothes. Maybe it won’t bother people outside the social media bubble one bit. But maybe it will create boycotts. And maybe it will decrease sales. And that, folks, is BAD PR.
Anytime you have to issue an apology and interrupt your work growing your business, that is bad PR. No matter how many people are talking about you.
I’m not going to give Kenneth Cole a lesson in crisis driven by something stupid said on Twitter. Lots of people have already done that. Instead I recommend doing your flipping research so you don’t make the same mistakes as an intern did 18 months ago.
Update: 8:14 a.m. on Friday, February 4: Someone found a window decal in a Kenneth Cole store of the tweet. It seems Dino Dogan is correct…this was planned and I have now lost all faith in humanity. Bad PR sucks. Spin Sucks. And Kenneth Cole sucks.
Update: 8:19 a.m. on Friday, February 4 (I’m obsessed): Jeremiah Owyang is asking some intelligent questions and not getting a response from anyone, including Kenneth Cole. They might return his call – he’s a big deal. They’d just ignore me. So go, Jeremiah, go!
Can you help confirm how this was done? I’m having a hard time believing they would do this for a few reasons:
1) why would they put campaign copy on a window with the Twitter chrome?
2) The corporate website didn’t reflect the Cario language.
3) I’m not seeing any other images online that confirm this.
4) in the second picture (see top right) the copy interferes with visualization of the product display –advertising-wise, it just doesn’t make sense for the store front.
5) Given the trauma to the brand, no chance the store would have kept this up for a full day and into the night.
This could be: A decal someone slapped on the window (the coloring is a bit off from the KC logo) or a photoshop (per Hugger below), or a real KC campaign (which I doubt)
(I’m often wrong, but just want to double check before drawing conclusions)
Update: 12:18 p.m. on Friday, February 4: Decal is Photoshopped on to the store window. My view of humanity is beginning to be restored…a bit.
Update: 5:37 p.m. on Friday, February 4: Turns out the decal was NOT Photoshopped and this seems to be an intentional campaign to get people talking. Now I have an entirely different blog post to write. It’s going to be titled: Dear Kenneth Cole, SPIN SUCKS and so do you.
Update: 6:22 p.m. on Friday, February 4: The photos were real, but pranksters put them up, not Kenneth Cole. My head hurts now.
P.S. I’ll do this week’s #FollowFriday at noon today and the Top Five tomorrow for your weekend reading.
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[...] – and something that we would see more brands doing in the future. Gini Dietrich laments that Spin Sucks and this kind of tactic is what makes people distrust PR and the people who spin. She also updated [...]
[...] into the devastating events currently happening in Egypt was picked up and discussed on various PR and marketing blogs and news sites [...]
[...] me. What would you name the series? It runs every Friday at noon (except this week because of the Kenneth Cole fiasco) and it’s always the top five stories we think you should [...]
[...] now, you don’t want your brand to be the Kenneth Cole of [...]
[...] mad? Everyday I speak to a client or find a new story on the net which I can only describe as a social media car crash, and not a little fender bender, the real Guinness book of records pile [...]
[...] }else{ $('#dd_ajax_float').hide() } }); });Last week a lot was written about Kenneth Cole’s twitter debacle. Ironically while KC was busy riding the wave of trending topics like #egypt and #jan25, a little [...]
[...] to Enron, Toyota and BP), it can never be good when you or your company name is viewed negatively. Gini Dietrich summed it up nicely with this analysis: Anytime you have to issue an apology and interrupt your [...]
[...] this has probably not reached the Kenneth Cole level of PR fiascos but the ripples of that brand debacle in the Middle East has now hit the US [...]
[...] With these 132 characters, designer Kenneth Cole unleashed a worldwide revolt: not against the Egyptian regime, but against the ill-advised use of Twitter. The tweet generated an immediate backlash from social media observers, marketing professionals and fashion bloggers, making Cole an instant poster boy for social media PR gone horribly wrong. [...]
[...] With these 132 characters, designer Kenneth Cole unleashed a worldwide revolt: not against the Egyptian regime, but against the ill-advised use of Twitter. The tweet generated an immediate backlash from social media observers, marketing professionals and fashion bloggers, making Cole an instant poster boy for social media PR gone horribly wrong. [...]
[...] Cole tweeted about the Egyptian revolution to promote his new collection, the social web saw red. Gini Dietrich of ArmentDietrich wrote Maybe it won’t bother people outside the social media bubble one bit. But [...]
[...] Dietrich, Gini. “Kenneth Cole Demonstrates How Not to Use Twitter | Spin Sucks.” Spin Sucks – Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting for Marketing and PR. 04 Feb. 2011. Web. 04 Feb. 2011. <http://spinsucks.com/social-media/kenneth-cole-demonstrates-how-not-to-use-twitter/>. [...]
[...] mad? Everyday I speak to a client or find a new story on the net which I can only describe as a social media car crash, and not a little fender bender, the real Guinness book of records pile [...]
[...] http://spinsucks.com/social-media/kenneth-cole-demonstrates-how-not-to-use-twitter/ [...]
[...] Twitter. But the thing about being someone who primarily listens online is you see so many people shoot themselves in the foot, that it can a little intimidating.” Am I going to sound like a complete idiot?” you [...]
[...] Ugly: Kenneth Cole, hands down, gets this award from me. He fell flat on his face when he used the uprising in Egypt [...]
[...] Tweeting before thinking – We’ve all heard the stories about Kenneth Cole, the Red Cross, and a lot of the other companies that screwed up when they tweeted something they [...]
[...] talk a lot here about what we would have done if we were counseling News Corp. or Kenneth Cole or Tiger Woods. But, finally, a PR professional got it [...]
[...] Tweeting before thinking – We’ve all heard the stories about Kenneth Cole, the Red Cross, and a lot of the other companies that screwed up when they tweeted something they [...]
[...] just write the policy. Actually go through it with your employees. Give them examples like Kenneth Cole, Papa John’s, and Boners BBQ. Talk to them about the importance of being professional, no [...]
[...] such as Chrysler, Kenneth Cole, and CelebBoutique have all made the mistake of tweeting something offensive from the business [...]
[...] none of the examples are as tacky as the Kenneth Cole Cairo tweet – and one does offer generators and air mattresses for those affected by the storm – [...]
[...] also be good for this, as long as they aren’t crisis events. Don’t do something like Kenneth Cole or the Gap did as they tried to take advantage of bad situations, and paid the price for it. [...]
[...] Usually when something for a Brand goes viral it is because they did something dumb (Chrysler), wrong (BP Oil Spill), or stupid (Kenneth Cole). [...]