Content Strategy for the Masses

During the protests in Egypt, designer Kenneth Cole was given a strong lesson in how not to use recent events on Twitter to self promote, and thanks to some quick actions and ownership of his mistake, recovered. Now Microsoft may need to look to the designer for some damage control lessons.

After the horrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Microsoft’s Bing search engine posted a ‘retweet’ challenge – they will donte $1 for every @bing retweet up to $100,000 for quake victims.

Oops. Backlash started pretty quickly as people accused Microsoft of using the disaster to promote their search engine and their “corporate citizenship” page, which shows how Microsoft is helping Japan.

Meanwhile, Bing’s competitor Google created a popular people finder for those trying to find friends and relatives in the disaster, and released their satellite images to help resources on the ground find those in the most amount of danger. No retweet challenge or marketing plan needed because these services are worthwhile and deployed during times of need.

Bing’s Twitter team later apologized for their tweet, claiming their intention was to make it easy for people to donate to the cause. Their original tweet, however, was not deleted and continues to be retweeted, even by Bing’s celebrity spokespeople like Ryan Seacrest. In other words, this marketing plan continues despite admitting to an error.

You may remember something like this happened only a few weeks ago when designer Kenneth Cole tweeted inappropriately that the protests in Egypt were actually people excited about his new collection. He quickly recovered from this by owning up to the mistake, removing the original tweet and stating it was his personal error. No excuses.

How can Microsoft recover?

- delete the RT challenge tweet

- add “how to donate” to their Bing homepage

- use their expertise to create a tool that helps the cause

Is this a marketing fail by Microsoft, or just a misguided attempt to raise awareness of how to donate funds to the cause? How else could Microsoft help? While you’re thinking of this, please also consider donating as there’s nothing worse than analyzing a company’s $100K donation when you haven’t given anything yourself.

How to donate:

Canadians wishing to help support relief efforts underway are encouraged to contribute by:

• Donating online
• Calling 1-800-418-1111
• By texting the word ASIA to 30333 to make a one-time donation of $5*
• By contacting their local Red Cross office. Cheques should be made payable to the Canadian Red Cross, earmarked “Japan Earthquake/Asia-Pacific Tsunami” and mailed to the Canadian Red Cross National Office, 170 Metcalfe Street, Suite 300, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2P2.

Americans can donate: text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation

This YouTube channel is a must-see for anyone who creates online content for kids. “Kids React!” is a collection of feedback by children up to 14 years old after watching top viral videos, YouTube stars and memes. It’s a good reminder that what’s funny to us may not be funny to them (and vice versa!)

How do you clean marker off an iPad screen?

This will be a top question on content farms soon when kids lose the stylus for Crayola’s upcoming, very cool looking app – Colour Studio HD.

I recently had to book some flights for business travel and the online landscape has changed. Did you hear the one about American Airlines not appearing on Expedia? Back in January, American Airlines has its second falling out with an online airline sales website due to contract issues, namely the airline wants to pay these sites less money and have users book directly on their own website.

Airlines and hotels are increasingly encouraging the public to book directly on their corporate sites rather than through third party aggregators to offer additional buy-ins like hotel room upgrades and airline seat choices to the consumer. This trend could force Expedia, Travelocity and others to change their business models slightly in order to stay in business.

While Global Business Travel Assn says booking directly with the airline and the hotelier may increase costs for the customer, other sites are popping up to help you compare prices and make sure you’re getting the bang for your buck. Here’s one to show your colleagues: Hipmunk.com is a very easy-t0-use site that organizes its search based on time, price and agony. It doesn’t support all airlines, yet. Toronto’s Porter Airlines for example, wasn’t appearing in any of their beautiful charts.  Upon chatting with their very helpful live help chat, they thanked me for letting them know the airline was missing. How nice!

Bonus: OK, so say you’re flying to the U.S. and you want to check up on an airport’s hands-on TSA review process, look no further than this TSA Status site, created and updated by its users.  This heavily rainbowed site doesn’t have the cleanest of interfaces, but it is handy. It’s also a great place if you feel a compulsion to complain about a TSA agent online.

So next time you need to book a flight for work or pleasure, impress everyone with your knowledge of these two handy sites. Got others?

Oh dear. So, earlier today I was alerted to a tweet posted by the clothing design clothing company, Kenneth Cole.

I shouldn’t NEED to explain why this was in poor taste today, less than 24 hours after peaceful protests turned violent. But I just did.

Given the amount of outrage this tweet caused, Kenneth Cole took responsibility for the mistweet in an apology on Twitter and then on the company’s Facebook page.

His damage control was swift:

1. He apologized personally and took responsibility. Though his initial tweet says “we weren’t intending to make light,” he later clarified in a further tweet that his “joke” didn’t come from an employee at Kenneth Cole, but from him personally.

2. His team isn’t countering the negative comments with excuses on why it happened.

Yes, this tweet was in poor taste and some comments even accuse the company of posting something controversial for free publicity (forgetting, of course, this is a fashion company), but there but for the grace of God go I, people. Here are some lessons we can all take away from this:

-  Once you post something online, it never goes away. @kennethcole deleted the original tweet, but I found it easily.

- If you schedule your tweets, it’s probably best to not schedule upcoming posts beyond 24 hours, particularly if your tweet is related to current events.

- If you’ve made an error, take a short break to catch your breath. Then, calmly take responsibility, admit the error, apologize and move on. If you’re the CEO, go on social media yourself, even if the blame lies with an employee.

- You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last company or person to embarrass yourself on social media. I’ve accidentally tweeted DMs, celebrities fight it out with each other on Twitter , and there’s always Kanye to the rescue.

Any other rules for social media to share? Comment!