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'Listen to Mom': Important Advice for Brands as Well As Kids

Moms are notorious for using cautionary tales to dissuade their kids from bad behavior. “Quit sticking your head through the banister or you’ll wind up with it stuck like Billy down the street!” You’ve probably heard some of these same admonitions yourself (or maybe you’ve even said them!)

But what if moms, collectively, become the cautionary tale? Such is the case in this brave new world of organized consumer voice. Case in point – Safeway – who found themselves in a social-media-fueled PR nightmare last week following a series of increasingly poor decisions by security staff and management at a Honolulu Safeway location.

On Oct. 27th Safeway management ordered the arrest of a pregnant woman and her active military husband for accidentally walking out of the store without paying for two grab-and-go sandwiches. The story goes that the woman became dizzy while shopping with her husband and 2-year-old daughter so she openly snacked on the sandwich in the store, but forgot to submit the wrapper while they were paying for the rest of their groceries. They were stopped by security after leaving the store, acknowledged their mistake and offered to pay for the sandwiches. Instead they were charged with shoplifting, each required to pay $50 bail, and most egregiously their daughter was taken into custody by Child Welfare Services and held overnight; in short, a nightmare for this young family over $5 worth of chicken salad.

Five days later, the incident was covered on Today, Fox News, and CNN, along with national multimedia syndication through AP and Reuters. But what happened in the five days between the arrest and the media circus? A LOT.

Feeling helpless while trying to get her daughter out of state custody, one of the first things the frightened mom did was turn to her social media community. There she had a voice!

According to the AP’s coverage of the story, “While they waited, Leszczynski vented about the experience on babycenter.com and contacted a lawyer for help with being reunited with Zofia.” Leszczynski is a member of the January 2012 Birth Club on the phenomenally popular babycenter.com where she started a discussion string titled “we were arrested – dd in cps custody” (note: dd = dear daughter in mom community speak). The news spread like wildfire on the site and just a few hours later there were multiple threads, each with hundreds of comments outraged over the ordeal. This protective group of moms continued to spread the Leszczynski’s plight in the days that followed with threads like “Pregnant woman arrested over $5, child taken away by CPS” and “Pregnancy Hunger + Hawaii Safeway = Arrest” which repeatedly called for shoppers to tweet, blog, re-post and speak their mind on Safeway’s Facebook page.

The first public acknowledgment of the incident on Safeway’s Facebook page took place days after the incident, on Oct. 29th. Further, their corporate-speak response (lifted from the official press release) to the emotionally-charged issue did nothing but fan the flames:

Safeway Facebook

Whoa – 1500 comments! Nearly all of which were negative! Shoppers were outraged that Safeway did not immediately drop the charges, and many called for boycotts. It wasn’t until later in the day that Safeway released a statement to media and on their Facebook page that all charges were dropped.

Now comes the speculation - would this story have had such extensive mainstream media coverage if it wasn’t preceded by a not-so-small army of angry moms marching throughout social media? I speculate no. Could Safeway have monitored the initial reaction to the story, quickly learned the pain points and released a timely and appropriate response to all the moms in social media who could so easily relate to the Leszczynski’s plight? Absolutely yes. Instead, Safeway let the social media mom mob dictate the story, and then allowed the mainstream press to cover it in two phases - the first portraying Safeway as a heartless corporation in a time when heartless corporations are enduring their fair share of social media criticism.

So the cautionary tale here: listen to moms – not just your mom, but the millions of social media savvy moms who can quickly mobilize through social channels and cause an embarrassing (and potentially harmful) scene for your brand.

Find out how Kantar Media Cymfony can help you with your social strategy:  http://cymfony.com

 

Posted by Kari D'Elia on November 9, 2011 at 01:23 PM | Email this post Permalink

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Comments

Very well written and a good read. Cautionary tale for anyone: in the 30+ minutes it can take a company's PR department to write and issue a statement to the press, one version of the story will have circulated among thousands of people through social media. And once the first story is out, there's too much chatter to hear what follows.

Posted by: Luca Zanzi | Nov 9, 2011 4:59:46 PM

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