Target Misses the Social Media Target

Earlier this month, Amy Jussel, founding director of Shaping Youth, a non-profit blog concerned with media and marketing’s impact on kids, complained to Target about a billboard that depicts a young woman with her legs spread lying on top of the Target logo, with her crotch right on top of the logo’s bulls’ eye. “Targeting crotches with a bull’s-eye is not the message we should be putting out there,” she said. Target “responded” to the complaint with the following, as reprinted in the New York Times: “Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets,” a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth. “This practice,” the public relations person added, “is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest,” as Target refers to its shoppers. “We do not work with bloggers currently,” said a company spokeswoman, Amy von Walter, who agreed to speak with this traditional media outlet. But we have made exceptions,” Ms. von Walter said. “And we are reviewing the policy and may adjust it. Target’s policy is to focus limited resources on the big media outlets, like television stations and newspapers, which reach large numbers of shoppers. We want to make sure we are making an educated decision and we live up to any promises we make, in terms of service.” Target’s public relations department learned something about new media: it’s interconnected with old media and the links and lines between the two are not always clear. The moral of the story is look closely at when to engage the blogosphere and when to step away from the conversation. While Target may not have had a policy in place to actively reach out to bloggers, it should at least have known something about how the blogosphere works. For example, what did Target think would happen, when it told a blogger, (paraphrasing) “we don’t talk to the likes of you?” Seriously? Couldn’t it have predicted that the blogger would feel slighted and that other bloggers would also feel belittled? Obviously Target didn’t see that coming–hindsight is 20/20–but surely it watched how the story spread in social media. Once the “blog storm” started, Target should have switched into “crisis communication” mode which should apply to whichever platform is being used. If it had backtracked on its statement, contacted the original blogger, offered an interview, and generally treated them like adults, Target could have avoided this storm in a teacup from reaching the New York Times.