PR 101

Six words that should never be uttered in any planning meeting are the following: “You know what would be cool?” I suspect that’s how the current debacle started for my hometown Milwaukee Brewers. What I am sure someone thought was a cool promotion instead made the Brewers the target of a lot of angry fans and the subject of a lot of jokes.

What the Brewers did and didn’t do is also a lesson for any marketer who has an idea that seems to be a surefire winner. I am willing to bet no one in planning the promotion that backfired asked “what if … goes wrong.” Until you think something through from every angle, you are asking for trouble. As the Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu said: “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here’s what happened to the Brewers. As a promotion, the team placed 1,400 statues of mascot Bernie Brewer across Wisconsin parks early Tuesday morning. Some of the statues had a prize attached, including ticket vouchers, player autographs, and merchandise.

The idea was Bernie would tweet clues to the location of each statue so fans could find them. Under the rules, the contest was to begin at 7 a.m. People were supposed to take only one of the statutes. It didn’t work out that way.

Instead, people were grabbing as many as possible. There were reports of people sleeping in their cars overnight near parks where the statutes were to be placed. One woman tweeted she had taken over three dozen. People were trying to sell the statutes on EBay and Craigslist. This caused a lot of angry comments from people who tried to follow the rules.

Clearly no one at the Brewers thought this thing through. This is a clear case I feel of “you know what would be cool?” No one in the meeting asked the “what if fans get greedy and take more than one” question.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true: “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”

There are hundreds of comments on social media sites posted by angry fans. The story went viral. I read a lot of the comments. People are really angry or laughing at the Brewers. Neither is good. The fact that the Brewers insisted that promotion went mostly okay shows me they don’t understand the power of social media.

Where the Brewers failed was not taking human nature into account. You announce you are giving away for free something people want they are going to find ways to game the system. Once the idea of the giveaway was decided on, the next topic of discussion should have been how to prevent the hoarding.

Brewers spokesman said the promotion went well with the exception of “some isolated” incidents. Wrong. They should have apologized profusely. That’s crisis communications 101.

What should the Brewers have done, or more accurately what would I have done?

First, there would have been no actual tickets, merchandise or autographed items in the statues if I were running things. What there would have been were vouchers for those items. Stamped on each voucher would be the words “One Prize Per Address or Family.” No, it wouldn’t have completely stopped the hoarding. But it would have cut down on it.

Second, I would have implanted a locator chip in each Bernie statue. Once I saw that more than Bernie was in one location, I would have noted the IDs on the chips (yes, the technology exists.) Whoever brought any of those hoarded statues in for redemption would have been disqualified automatically.

Third, to prevent anyone from selling the statutes on EBay or Craigslist, I would make it very public that the statutes can be purchased from the Brewers for $48. That would kill that market.

Fourth, I would have made those statues a heck of lot harder to find. Scavenger hunts are not supposed to be easy.

Now it is true that the people who thought they would corner the Bernie Brewer statue market are not particularly ethical or honest. But that’s human nature.

The failure was with the Brewers and their planning. You have to think these things through. It is why the first thing JJC Communications LLC does with a new client is an analysis what could go right and what could wrong. If you only do one of those, you end up with a lot of angry fans and people laughing at you.

If you want to learn more about how to such an analysis, let me know.

I run into to this all the time from potential clients. They tell me they have hired a web designer who has built a website geared for search engine optimization. I always congratulate them on doing that because an SEO-enabled webpage is part of a successful social media campaign.

It is only the foundation though. Just building that webpage is like building the foundation of a house. Would you stop building your house after the footings were poured, the basement walls were built, and the basement floor was laid?

I can remember when I was a child going to visit one of the men who worked for my father. The guy was building his own house. The only thing he had completed when we went there was the basement. He had put the first floor on, but at that time it was the roof. He and his family were living in that basement.

The place kind of looked like a bunker actually. The concrete block walls were sticking up about two feet above ground level. The first floor/ceiling was covered with black tar paper. It sat in the middle of a wooded lot on a dirt road out in the country. It was kind of hard to see unless you were almost on top of it. It wasn’t easy to find.

That’s what happens when you build only a webpage, but don’t add anything else.  You have a structure you can live in, but it’s very basic. It is kind of like that foundation at the end of the dirt round. Unless someone knows specifically what they are looking for, they are not likely to find it – SEO or not.

So what should be done next?

A successful social media campaign only happens if inbound marketing techniques are used. It is inbound marketing that drives the effort. That SEO-enabled website is only the first step. Inbound marketing is building links to your website so it moves up the search rankings.

One of the most important parts of a social media campaign is ensuring that the website in question comes up on the first page of a Google search. Preferably it should come up within the first five results. Many searchers will not scroll down to see more results.

Before I go any further, I should note I build client marketing around Google, not Bing. I keep reading that Bing is going to give Google a run for its money, but I have yet to see any evidence of that. According the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace, Google held 65.3 percent of the search market in April. It has held about two-thirds of the search market for a long time.

“More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April,” comScore reported. “Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.”

I always go with the leader.

That being said, how do you seduce Google into ranking your website on that first page? Well, you build links to that website – i.e. inbound marketing.

How are those links built? By spreading your message around the web. That is done by blogging, especially blogging. Several studies by Boston-based Hubspot have found that blogging is the most effective way to build traffic.

There are other ways that also should be in the mix – Linkedin, YouTube,Twitter and Facebook are the big four. There are others though. The more links you can create to your website, the higher your Google ranking.

That’s just the first floor – actually the entranceway. Once you have people interested in your company, you need convert that interest into leads and eventually sales. That I will I talk about later.

So you see you can build and live in that foundation. But it is unlikely anyone is going find you if that’s all you do.

I am trying something new, but I need your help to do it. If have a question about social media, public relations, marketing or anything in between, post it as a question. I will answer one question each week. Please give it a try.

So I get an email the other day from a Linkedin connection. He wants me to invest in the next generation Groupon. It’s not going to happen. Why? Well because frankly it wasn’t a particularly creative idea. Creativity is what drives business success.

This is what I said in reply to the request:

“You don’t get rich by doing something somebody has already done. The Groupon space is getting pretty crowded, especially now that Facebook and Google are both jumping in.

“You get wealthy by coming up something entirely new, ala Facebook, Linkedin, or something like that. Each company founder identified an unmet need and filled it. That idea goes back to the founding of the Republic. Look at Edison, Bell, Ford, the Wright Bros., Watson, Jobs, Gates and others. They got there first and built empires.

“Come with up with a completely unique concept. I will be interested then.”

Being unique and creative are two keys to business success. It doesn’t matter if your company has one or 100 competitors. If your product and the way you market it are something new and exciting you will beat your competition like a drum. Actually the product doesn’t have to be that creative. If it a fills a need better than its competitors, you are going to be ahead of those competitors. Add in marketing in a way that attracts and engages your potential customers and you have driven the ball over the fence.

My agency works with established companies of all sizes. . Our clients, no matter the size or age of their company, are entrepreneurial. Their founders saw a need for something, came up with the product to fill that need, and took it to market. They didn’t copy anybody else. Because management has stuck with that, the companies are growing and dominating their competition.

Not wanting to just do what everyone else was doing in Milwaukee was why I decided to found my own agency. A lot of agencies still don’t understand what social media is or how to use it properly. A lot of them have seemingly rejected it. As importantly they also don’t know how to meld social media with traditional marketing and public relations. To ignore any of those three marketing channels seems to me to be the height of folly. It pretty much ensures creativity will be stifled. That’s the key to our success.

Entrepreneur and author Josh Linker drove that point home at Biztimes Milwaukee’s BizTech Conference-Expo last week. He spoke about companies have two choices: be creative or die.

In 1999 Linker founded an Internet copy called ePrize. He saw that while on-line advertising was taking off there was no online promotion company. ePrize is the company that developed all those games, contests and sweepstakes on-line companies offer. It has swamped its competition.

Linker points out in his book “Disciplined Dreaming” that: “Great companies are built on ideas. They discover new and compelling ways to solve problems for customers. They play to win rather than not-to-lost. In fact, we’ve reached a time when playing it safe has become the riskiest move of all. General Motors played it safe all the way to bankruptcy. Maxwell House played it safe as the more daring and creative Starbucks supplanted it as the leader of the coffee industry.”

Risk and creativity are two of the reasons I like social media and marketing in general. There are no guarantees, but the chances of success are much than just sitting on the bench. Think about it.