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.

The Model That Breaks the TV Mold

“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a very entertaining 45-minute musical that could have happened on TV, but didn’t. Instead, it was released online, where it was a huge, profitable hit, perhaps proving that great content can not only find an audience online, but make money for both its creators and advertisers. “Dr. Horrible” is a struggling super-villain with a crush on the girl at the laundromat, a video blog, and a tendency to break out in song. It is a quirky tale of love and super-heroes starring Neil Patrick Harris, that became a phenomenon online and proved that audiences would embrace content on the Web if it was done well, even if it meant sitting through commercials. The final cost of the production was estimated at $200,000. The creators, Jed, Zach and Joss Whedon convinced the cast and some of the crew to participate with the understanding that they might never get paid—not a business model one can expect to replicate with any regularity. But soon after “Dr. Horrible” hit the Web in three parts, at no charge and without advertising, money was no longer an issue. The series was later placed on Hulu with a single commercial break at the start of each act, and the soundtrack was sold for $9.99 on iTunes. The Whedons also produced T-shirts and other merchandise and spun off the series into a comic book for Dark Horse. Within months the cast and crew were paid in full, and the production has since made back more than twice its original cost. The lesson here is that if you produce good content for portable distribution, multiplatform distribution, people will pay for it, but not until you let them know what they are paying for. Douglas Quenqua, writer for Media says that this model could blossom into an enterprise that could truly be a source of inexpensive and profitable content made exclusively for the Web, further siphoning TV’s increasingly distracted audience.