Target’s Fiasco from a Public Relation’s View

Target’s snub of a blogger complaining about a billboard is a PR nightmare. While scalability to address social media seems to be an issue for many public relations departments (even at larger companies like Target, apparently), it doesn’t make sense that any company would dismiss a blogger’s inquiry given that they wouldn’t dismiss the same inquiry by an average customer. And therein lays the real rub. All bloggers are consumers and possibly customers. Period. Given that most companies would not brush off consumers the same way — “We are unable to respond to your inquiry because we do not address the concerns of customers because it’s not scalable to offer the same level of responsiveness across the board,”— it doesn’t make sense that a public relations department would brush off bloggers, consumers who may publicly write about it. So what’s the solution? Pretty simple, really. At minimum, even if the company has some erroneous anti-blogger policy, public relations departments need to be able to identify who is making the inquiry and then route the call to the appropriate department if the appropriate department is not public relations. That’s not a social media policy. It’s common sense. And if Target had applied even some semblance of it, they may have looked like heroes instead of something else. It takes far fewer words and follow up to simply send out something along the lines of … “Thank you for your inquiry. The advertisement is not meant to be sexually suggestive. However, we have forwarded your concern to our [insert department].”