Target Please Listen

Dear Target, a PR crisis is brewing for your company in the blogosphere. Please tell me you're listening. Love, Steve

Comments

[Alex Halavais]

They have a much better deal on sex, and that 4-6 week delivery is about average, in my experience.

I wonder how much traffic these are driving to the Target site. Is this a case of "as long as they spell our name right..."?

[Tom]

At least "Sex" seems to be by 'DJ Nasty Knock', though. What's even more amusing is the link to related products about "Substance Abuse" ya know?

Y'all get it, right? This is a book... Amazon has it too...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823916839/qid%3D1101622097/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-8100199-3071051

[david]

Someone at Boing Boing seems to have figured this out.

What it seems to come down to is sloppy front end design on their web site - AKA, not paying attention to what their customers are seeing and how their customers are interacting with them.

Bad bad bad!

[david]

ahem.. and that URL is http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/20/targetcom_sells_anal.html

[Trudy W. Schuett]

Right about now they're all wondering what to do about the Salvation Army fiasco, I bet. If it ain't one thing, it's another...

[Mark]

Maybe they're ginning up a promotion to sell more CDs this holiday season? First "sex," now "drugs," - isn't it a fair bet to guess rock-and-roll is next?

[Ed Rusch]

crisis? what crisis? Get a grip, Stevo. This is much ado about nothing.

It is a little self-serving of you, however, basically trying to score a pr contract.

[Steve Rubel]

Ed, I am not crisis specialist so I have nothing to gain here. I am merely pointing out something that you have to admit is damaging.

[Andy Wibbels]

Yeek. Everyone's so sensitive!

Sure - from a sysadmin point of view it makes total sense that data is shared between complimentary ecommerce stores and systems. But, you can't expect Joe Consumer to know - or care. You'd think they'd put a filter on there - I tried many slurs and slanders and all of them retrieved results.

And shouldn't a blog be self-serving? Ahem.

From a PR professional's POV I guess the point is that relatively mundane IT decisions can have a ripple effect across the brand and cause unexpected confusion or contusion.

[Robert Scoble]

Those of you who are saying that Steve is overblowing this are missing the point. I wrote about this more here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/11/28.html#a8763

Target is missing an opportunity to demonstrate that they are clued in. That they are listening.

With every hour that a representative of Target doesn't come here or any of the other blogs involved at this point it just demonstrates they don't know how to do searches on their company name on Pubsub, Feedster, or Technorati and that they haven't dedicated anyone to watch what people are saying about them online.

This is why I put my cell phone on my blog's home page. That way if something wacky is happening with a Microsoft property I can respond.

Just imagine what'll happen next time when the PR crisis is real?

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Scoble, you continue to exhibit your complete and utter failure to grasp reality.

The only "opportunity" Target has here is to sell a BOOK. A book Amazon.com is selling, and a book that will sell like many others online.

Why the hell should Target give a crap about blogs, Scoble? Microsoft hasn't demonstrated that it gives a hoot by hiring idiotic mouthpieces like yourself.

[Steve Rubel]

Robert is right. As I commented on Jeremy's blog, I don't fault Target for not jumping on this issue over Thanksgiving weekend. They're probably busy spending time with their families and not thinking about blogs or PR. Good for them. However, they should have snuffed out this technical issue on their Web site as soon as Boing Boing blogged it a week ago. That's a major high profile blogosphere hit on their brand, not some blogger like me tucked away in the far reaches of the galaxy.

[Neville Hobson]

Here's why Target should give a crap about blogs, Erik.

'Target pushes drugs' was the post title on the Inside Google blog. Nice attention-grabbing headline. Picked up by other bloggers (including me). Word spreads, and it still is, whether the story is correct or not.

Is it a PR crisis? Well, no - at least, not yet.

Where the PR opportunity now lies for Target is to grab this story, refute it and then restate some of the elements from their business conduct guide. Reinforce those messages. Do it through the blogosphere primarily. Target really can make it work to their advantage.

This is creating a PR advantage from thin air, so to speak.

To me, all of this represents a pretty powerful indicator of how the blogosphere can be a big influencer.

Oh, and think about this. 'Target pushes drugs' is a good headline. Just the type that likely would grab Robert's attention. Now imagine if his link blog had been working over the weekend :)

[Thomas Hawk]

I doctored the photo up a bit. I think we can sell more pot this way. http://thomashawk.com/2004/11/just-in-time-for-your-holiday-shopping.html

[Thomas Hawk]

More fun with Target. Do you know that you can also buy our 44th President of the United States, John Kerry? Or how about Christmas with Martha Stewart?

[Ed Rusch]

"To me, all of this represents a pretty powerful indicator of how the blogosphere can be a big influencer."

Yeah -- no one else gives a crap. It shows the influence of the blogosphere: ZERO.

[Ed Rusch]

"With every hour that a representative of Target doesn't come here or any of the other blogs involved at this point it just demonstrates they don't know how to do searches on their company name on Pubsub, Feedster, or Technorati and that they haven't dedicated anyone to watch what people are saying about them online."

And yet it didn't seem to impact their business one iota.

Geez, Scoble, you really do operate in a different reality, do you?

Let me put it more bluntly:

NO ONE CARES.

[Ed Rusch]

"That's a major high profile blogosphere hit on their brand, not some blogger like me tucked away in the far reaches of the galaxy."

Let's be a little real, Steve -- 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999 percent of the US populace has never even heard of Boing Boing. Being a high-profile blog doesn't really mean squat in the mainstream business world, and no matter how much you stomp up and down and cry wolf will it matter to the folk at Target, who are smarter AND hipper than you.

This is such a nonstory. The fact no one else cares should tell you something.

And don't deny you aren't trying to drum up some business. If Target came to you and asked you how to better advise them so those nasty old bloggers would play nice, you'd be there immediately. I bet you already have a rate plan already worked out.

[Ed Rusch]

"Target is missing an opportunity to demonstrate that they are clued in."

I think this qualified for the most arrogant statement of the year in the blogosphere, which is saying a lot. Just because Target isn't listening to YOU doesn't mean they don't listen to their target audience. The arrogance exhibited here by those who claim to know better than a rather successful business is just astounding.

[Mr. Nosuch]

The Venn diagram of:

1. People who really think you can buy marijuana from Target's web site.

2. People capable of using a computer.

is actually very, very small, and probably not part of Target's market.

However, a funny URL hack that sends lots of people who chuckle at that hack to your commerce web site (and who may just click around some more) is hardly bad publicity.

This is like someone panicing that a plumber's supply catalog lists "ballcocks". A person's level outrage about such things is inversely proportional to their intelligence.

Frankly I think Target is smart to ignore it, and there's hardly a reason to slam a patch in right away, since the only way to discover such gems is for the visiting user to tweak the URL.

[Jeremy]

It's a Chicken Little issue. The sky is not falling, this isn't a huge PR crisis, but rather something that has driven traffic to the Website.

What the crisis is is the lack of Web QA, and disgruntled Web engineers.

The bigger story here is that Merrill has raised Target's outlook, while downgrading WalMart, saying that Target is winning the air game. That is the story that the corporation cares about.

[Christopher Carfi]

Target responds.