This is a story about a multibillion, multinational conglomerate that committed a public relations gaffe - involving a wide-eyed, awestruck eight-year-old no less. If that were the entire story, it would end with the usual tsking-tsking about soulless corporate conglomerates that have lost their sense of humor. But it didn't end there. The company, Boeing, salvaged its original error with a series of Tweets, after having established its Twitter account only weeks prior to the incident - illustrating an intuitive use of the platform that not many large companies are able to master right away.
Harry Likes Planes
The story starts with an eight-year-old Harry Winsor, who loves airplanes, writes the Media Decoder blog at the New York Times. He also likes to design his own airplanes, and sent a drawing to Boeing with the suggestion that they build his plane. In response Harry got a form letter admonishing him about sending unsolicited ideas through the mail, and the intricacies of intellectual property rights.
Word got out about the response because, sadly for Boeing, Harry's father, John, is an marketing executive at Victors & Spoils, which among other functions uses crowdsourcing to build ad campaigns. He mentioned the incident on his blog and Tweeted about it. Boeing saw the messages. As the company explained it, it does have a valid reason for the automatic disclaimer as it gets a lot of unsolicited material and is vulnerable to IP theft accusations.
Boeing's initial response to Harry's drawing seemed in line with the tone-deafness of corporate America, the Seattle Weekly wrote - but what happened next reflected the opposite. Todd Blecher, a spokesman who runs Boeing's new Twitter feed, started Tweeting Harry's story, it said. "We're expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We're learning as we go," Blecher wrote in one message. Harry also got a phone call from Boeing about his drawing and a free tour of the Museum of Flight, Seattle Weekly says.
Tone Deaf
Not all companies are as quick-witted with their social media campaigns, writes Matthew Yeomans at Big Money. Yeomans tells of a recent account that asked his consultancy to advise the marketing department of a FTSE 100 company that had persuaded the legal department to let it start a Twitter account.
"Unfortunately no one in the department knew how to use Twitter, so they had co-opted their external public relations agency to write the tweets," he wrote. "Then they wanted their digital agency to publish the Tweets because the PR company also had never used Twitter. But before the digital agency could publish anything, each Tweet had to be signed off by- you guessed it! - legal."
Nestle Gets Caught Off Guard
Even when legal stays away from the Twitter account, companies have proven to be surprisingly ham-fisted in their responses.
Earlier this year Nestle found itself on the defensive after an attack lodged by Greenpeace first on YouTube and then on its Facebook page. The source of the environmental activists' ire was over Nestle's palm oil sourcing activities - activities that Greenpeace says palm hurts the habitats of endangered species, specifically Orangutans. Nestle was caught off guard by the viral and social media elements to the campaign - which played out in full view of the watching world in real time.
After its video campaign Greenpeace moved the protest to Nestle's Facebook page, where the company first response was a tepid: "we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic - they will be deleted". Activists had apparently used image altering software to change the company's logo. More protests followed, to which Nestle said: "Oh please… it's like we're censoring everything to allow only positive comments".
Nestle eventually back peddled with apologies: "This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We've stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude".
