Yet another company experimenting in social media marketing has forgotten that ethical practice still applies.
One of my students, Rosie, came up to me before class to tell me this crazy story, which she has allowed me to repeat here. The bottom line is that even if it doesn’t blow up in their faces, they have now been used as a case study of “cavalier social media marketing” in at least two classes at UGA & have left a bad taste in the mouth of everyone who hears this story.
Rosie is a member of Target (yes, as in the Target) Rounders — one of those many groups online you sign up for & you get points for marketing a product. They come up with new products & then everyone on their list finds fun ways to promote it for “points.” She connects with them via Facebook, where they have a group.
Last week she got a newsletter (issue #107) from Target Rounders saying:
Your mission: try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder. We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops (and the shower, and on the bus…). However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group! So keep it like a secret!
Wow. What ever happened to never ask someone to lie for you?
She, being pretty up on ethics & social media, was taken aback. So she left a wall/discussion comment calling this request out as being unethical.
Exactly 18 minutes later she gets a “friendly” message from someone asking her for more details on what happened. Rosie, ever the inquisitive PR student, did some searching on that person’s networks & affiliations.
The message came from someone who works for an agency that has — guess who! — Target as a client. The message to Rosie never revealed this affiliation. Strike two.
Damage control begins.
Rosie even got a phone call from the VP of that agency trying to clear it up. Even though everyone agreed it wasn’t right, they still maintained it was a “miscommunication” of some sort. Another e-mail communication from the lead Rounder, “Laura Rounder,” claims that the newsletter
“was not endorsed by Target.”
Hmm. Funny.
I thought when a company hired an agency to do work & market them, that work kinda WAS on the company’s behalf. Not to mention the link to Target.com in the footer of the newsletter. Silly me.
But wait. There’s more.
Rosie’s original wall/discussion posting that started this whole conversation?
Gone.
Deleted.
Poof!
No joke.
Strike three. Target, you’re out.
Rosie says the discussion archive is still there (I haven’t looked for it, but did look on the TR’s FB wall) - but it took her forever to find. And she said they did update the originally unethical text on the Web site to read:
Thank you for your enthusiasm for the Rounders! We love it! If you want to spread the word about how to be a part of the Rounders program please let your friends know that they can visit www.targetrounders.com to get information and fill out a quick application to get accepted. Also remember that we do not want others to feel excluded from the Rounders program, so keep that in mind when chatting about it with your friends online.
But really. Someone please make the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s ethical guidelines the home page for all the computers at this agency.
Great example of what not do to… wow, would have thought by now they would have figured this out.
Sending this post to some of my social media PR team…in hopes this further squashes any bad ideas they get
Herb
Hey Kaye:
Thanks for posting this.It may have been an oversight, but it’s sad that Target, a darling of social-media marketing, would think of doing that.
Chris
[...] 3. Tom Foremski likens PR industry to Wile E. Coyote in RoadRunner cartoons. Sneak peak of next post: Advertising industry is akin to Oil Can Harry from Mighty Mouse. 4. Target discovers a way to grow astroturf indoors. [...]
Thanks everyone for reading … the main gripe I have here is more a trend I see: agencies are selling themselves as social media experts & then they go in not having a clue how to operate in these spaces! Buyer beware, I guess.
Wow, smart work from Rosie! I hope I’ll get to meet her @ the CONNECT Conference.
I tweeted a link to this post.
Blogging and social media usage has a netiquette and a clear, if not always publicized, set of ethics and morals, a consensus list of rules for conduct.
Not to limit creativity or innovation, but to purify and cleanse from MSM crap and ad agency Enronisms.
Authenticity. Passion. Transparency. are three of the values that some Korporate Amerikkka organizations consistently violate, thinking they can get away with it.
Incentivized opinions are not wanted in the blogosphere or social media realm.
It’s like your husband being secretly paid by a university, in an ethnomethodology experiment, to say romantic things to you, at $10 per statement.
Once you found out he was being paid to seduce you, you’d surely be quite disgusted and upset, never trusting his advances ever again.
It’s PayPerPost and other compensated, coached, inauthentic recommendations, or slurs and reproaches, that will poison, pollute, and make worthless the peer-to-peer recommendation system of the social media sphere.
I came to this post via a Twitter message.
http://twitter.com/vaspers
Great post, Kaye. I think you hit it on the head here:
“…agencies are selling themselves as social media experts & then they go in not having a clue how to operate in these spaces! Buyer beware, I guess.”
Target …
Target has been busted for some very unethical stealthy behavior. They are running an program called Target Rounders with volunteer college evangelists who are asked to promote the company. The problem: They have asked the participants to hide their in…
What strikes me is that social media seems to be demonstrating just how unethical public relations practitioners have become. Blatantly asking someone to lie is unethical, in my view, in any profession or forum.
Greetings, all:
I’m a Grady grad myself, but now cover retail right here in Minneapolis, Target’s headquarters.
Any chance you could find Rosie for me? I smell a news story.
612-673-7335
Hi Kaye
I got here after reading Andy Sernovitz’s post about Target.
According to my experience, the clients don’t know that their representors and ignoring WOMMA ethic codes.
It is our job as marketers to explain them how thing work in social media so their expectations from us will be realistic.
Omer Rosen,
Israel
[...] Evidently Target (through an agency) broke one of the golden rules of word-of-mouth marketing: they told some of their WOMMers not to let their Facebook buddies know who they were. Odd that we haven’t heard much about this here at Target HQ in Minneapolis (except [...]
Thanks again to the rest of you reading & taking interest in this story. It continues to surprise me that something we were all taught & really understood by age 4 (do not lie) seems to go out the window professionally.
Omar really gets to the point of this though - this is not just showing the worst of our practice (for both PR & marketing) but it is just bag professional behavior all around.
Thanks to everyone who has taken such an interest in this story! I’ll be updating my blog with links to other people who are covering it, so if you mention it in your blog or on your website, I would love to know.
rosiesiman.blogspot.com
rosiesiman[at]gmail.com
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Where do i sign up for Target Rounders?
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