Despite the plethora of types of families in this country, the new Cheerios ad featuring a little black girl, her white mother and her black father caused a stir on the internet that lead to negative comments all over the blogosphere.

The commercial is very heartwarming, actually. The ad begins with a young girl asking her mother if the cereal is “good for your heart.” Her mother assures her that is so. The girl runs away with a cereal box, and in the next scene, the girl’s sleeping father awakes with a pile of Cheerios atop the side of his chest where his heart is. The commercial ends with the word “Love” on screen.

When negative (and racist) comments started sweeping across the internet, a rep from Cheerios said the ad would “absolutely not” be withdrawn. Meredith Tutterow, the associate marketing director for Cheerios and Multigrain Cheerios at General Mills said “there are many kinds of families and Cheerios just wants to celebrate them all.” While the majority of viewers of the YouTube video did NOT feel it was offensive (42,084 viewers gave it the “Thumbs Up” while 2,057 gave it a “Thumbs Down”), many people took to the comments section to blast the commercial. Eventually, comments were disabled for that particular video on YouTube.

While disabling the comments may not be the reaction that every brand would have, Cheerios immediately issued a statement (good job!). Camille Gibson, the brand’s vice president of marketing, said “the [YouTube] comments that were made were, in our view, not family friendly. And that was really the trigger for us to pull them off. … Ultimately we were trying to portray an American family. And there are lots of multicultural families in America today.”

We applaud Cheerios for the way that they handled the small backlash from fans. They stood up for an ad that they believed in and didn’t back down. For better or worse, the ad has generated over 3.3 million views on YouTube and has created a buzz for the under-the-radar brand.

In a study titled “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy,” the Pew Research Center discovered that teens are leaving Facebook to go to Twitter. While we know that teens are sharing information about themselves at an all-time high, they’re also moving increasingly to Twitter to avoid their parents and the “oversharing” that they see on Facebook.

Pew’s research showed that 94 percent of teens who are social media users have a profile on Facebook; this figure has remained unchanged since last year. Now, 26% of teen social media users were on Twitter: more than double from the figure in 2011 of 12 percent. In focus groups, teens said there were “too many adults on Facebook and too much sharing of inane details, like what a friend ate for dinner.” This is hilarious because…that is the entire point of social networking: inundating your friends and family with every detail of your lives. The kids have had enough and they aren’t happy.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

“Facebook just really seems to have more drama,” said 16-year-old Jaime Esquivel, a junior at C.D. Hylton High School in Woodbridge, Va., in an interview.  According to the AP, “Esquivel said he still checks his Facebook account daily but isn’t using it as regularly as in the past. He sees teens complaining on Twitter, too, so Esquivel has been using the photo-sharing service Instagram more often, posting a couple of pictures each day and communicating with friends.”

Here are some other interesting (read: SCARY) figures from Pew’s research:

• 91% post a photo of themselves, up from 79% in 2006.
• 71% post their school name, up from 49%.
• 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%.
• 53% post their email address, up from 29%.
• 20% post their cell phone number, up from 2%.
• 92% post their real name to the profile they use most often.
• 84% post their interests, such as movies, music, or books they like.
• 82% post their birth date.
• 62% post their relationship status.
• 24% post videos of themselves.

What we find concerning at this Albany marketing agency is the more than 60 percent of the teens with Twitter accounts said their tweets were public. This means that ANYONE can see their personal, private tweets or pictures posted to Twitter. About one-quarter of kids said their tweets were private and 12 percent said they did not know whether their tweets were public or private.  Listen up parents, it’s time to teach your kids about privacy!

When you go on a show called “Kitchen Nightmares,” it seems inevitable that it can only end badly if you have a bad attitude. Kitchen Nightmares follows famous chef Gordon Ramsay around the country as he tries to help debilitated restaurants come back from the dead.  Amy, the owner of Amy’s Baking Company of Scottsdale, Arizona, claims she lost a “tremendous amount of business” from bad bloggers criticizing her cooking. Perhaps the bloggers were on the right track. During the filming of the show, both customers and the restaurant’s own waitstaff criticized the food. It seems that not only the food is the problem, as customer service at the restaurant leaves much to be desired. Word to the wise: when customers call over the manager to discuss issues with their dinner, don’t tell them “you don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like” and walk away.  You need only watch the episode for a few minutes before one universal truth becomes abundantly clear: restaurant owners Amy and Samy are FIFTY SHADES OF CRAZY.

But that’s neither here no there. If you want a glimpse into the hell that is life at the restaurant, you need only watch the first 5 minutes of the show here.

Owner's of Amy's Baking Company, Amy and Samy

What this Albany marketing firm is more interested in is what ensued AFTER the airing of the show. After the airing of the show, something happened on the Amy’s Baking Company Facebook page that Buzzfeed refers to as “The Most Epic Brand Meltdown On Facebook, Ever.” See some screenshots below to see how the situation spiraled out of control:

And those are just the highlights!

The following day, after the incident went viral, the following post was found on their Facebook page:

Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy & Samy

Perhaps someone is having a little remorse about their bad behavior?  PR gurus, how would you handle this situation ifthis restaurant was your client?

In the simplest terms: Facebook Home is a program that allows Facebook to OWN your phone (figuratively, not literally). It basically turns you phone into a walking, portable Facebook…WAY more so than having traditional alerts pop-up constantly on your home screen.

Facebook Home is the sort of thing that only a mad genius like Zuck could dream up. Facebook Home is software for your phone designed to “put your friends above everything else” (those are the Facebook blog’s words, not mine. Mine would be way funnier). Facebook Home is downloaded by users for free, or can even pre-installed in the next phone you purchase. Some of the main features of Facebook Home are:

Cover feed: Users can merely glance at their phone for photos and posts from their Facebook News Feed.

Chat heads: Facebook Home allows you to send/receive texts and Facebook messages all in one place. Open, close and drag chat heads around your screen to keep chatting while you’re using other apps. (this is the same concept as when we used AOL Instant Messager in college.: “OMG, I can chat, listen to Windows Media Player AND Google info to plagiarize my paper!?!”).

Notifications: Real-time newsfeed notifications on your home-screen.

App launcher: Get right to your favorite apps and post to Facebook from the same place.

Facebook put together a SUPER WHOLESOME video on YouTube to give people a peek into what Facebook Home is all about. Personally, while it may be a very cool and forward-thinking idea, I find Facebook Home completely and totally useless. First of all, doesn’t Facebook control our lives enough (I know it does for those PR/marketing gurus out there)? At least now when I go to my home-screen, I get a brief respite from the inundation of what friends/brands are doing this exact minute (like pee-pad training their labradoodle). Second, and more importantly, don’t plug-ins through current apps make FB Home obsolete? For example, I don’t need to use Facebook Home to share my Instagram photos with my followers, I can simply sync/link Instagram to make Facebook account and get the same results. The same is true with Foursquare (obviously you can see which apps I am using the most!).

As we know, everyone has an opinion (including me), so let’s look at some data from the Wall Street Journal to see how Facebook Home is doing as it reaches its One Month anniversary. The WSJ reports that Facebook Home is getting a million downloads a week. Sounds like a huge number right? In anyone’s eyes, this would be a success.  One million downloads a week = 4 million in it’s first month alone. Then Mike Isaac points out that “one million downloads of Facebook Home is less than .1 percent of Facebook’s entire monthly active user base, now topping 1.1 billion people every month. And as the company disclosed in its last earnings call, more than 750 million of those people visit Facebook regularly via mobile device. Put simply, one million downloads is a drop in the social ocean.”

How many of you have used Facebook Home?  Who plans to?  We want to hear from you!

One April 16, 2013, Laura Wellington, a Boston Marathon participant posted the following picture on her Facebook wall with a simple message:

Please help me by sharing this!

As some of you know, I was 1/2 mile from the finish line when the explosion went off. I had no idea what was going on until I finally stopped and asked someone. Knowing that my family was at the finish line waiting for me, I started panicking, trying to call them. Diverted away from the finish line, I started walking down Mass Ave towards Symphony Hall still not knowing where my family was. Right before the intersection of Huntington, I was able to get in touch with Bryan and found out he was with my family and they were safe. I was just so happy to hear his voice that I sat down and started crying. Just couldn’t hold it back. At that moment, a couple walking by stopped. The woman took the space tent off her husband, who had finished the marathon, and wrapped it around me. She asked me if I was okay, if I knew where my family was. I reassured her I knew where they were and I would be ok. The man then asked me if I finished to which I nodded “no.” He then proceeded to take the medal off from around his neck and placed it around mine. He told me “you are a finisher in my eyes.” I was barely able to choke out a “thank you” between my tears.

 Odds are I will never see this couple again, but I’m reaching out with the slim chance that I will be able to express to them just what this gesture meant to me. I was so in need of a familiar face at that point in time. This couple reassured me that even though such a terrible thing had happened, everything was going to be ok.

Wellington’s Facebook posting quickly went viral as she searched for the Good Samaritan that helped her that day. At the time of this posting, the photo has received almost 300,000 Likes with over 200,000 Facebook users sharing the picture on their newsfeed. A few hours after her post went viral, Wellington’s request was answered: she heard from Brent Cunningham, the gentleman who gave her his medal!

Cunningham is a native of Sitka, Alaska and had just arrived at a business meeting in Anchorage when he heard about the post. “This is the craziest story,” he told the Star.com by phone. “I never thought we’d connect again. Why would we? How would we?” They initially contacted each other through Facebook and then were able to have a brief phone conversation where Wellington thanked him again and explained how much the gesture meant to her. When Cunningham talks about the incident, he says “she needed it more than I needed it. I just wanted her to know that ‘you’re worth it.’ With everything that has happened, our world is looking for hope.”

Through social media, these two were connected and Wellington was able to thank her Good Samaritan. Amidst all the chaos that has happened in Boston, we are happy to know there are many people out there with open hearts and generous spirits!

Brent Cunningham, 46, from Sitka, Alaska, has been identified as the good Samaritan who gave Laura Wellington his medal for finishing the Boston Marathon.

The Digiday website has put together a list of 15 “must-know” stats on online videos! 

•  89 million people in the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos today. (ComScore)
• Online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016. (Cisco)
• Only about 24 percent of national brands are using online video to market to consumers. (Kantar Media)
• Online video now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic and up to 69 percent of traffic on certain networks. (Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report)
• Consumers give up on an online video if it doesn’t load in two seconds. (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Akamai Technologies)
• Users sharing video on retail and brand sites chose Facebook 46 percent of the time, with email accounting for 40 percent and Twitter capturing 14 percent of shares. (Invodo)
• Globally, online video traffic will be 55 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2016. (Cisco)
• 52 percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions. (Invodo)
• Mobile and tablet shoppers are three times as likely to view a video as laptop or desktop users. (NPD)
• Mobile video ads that include social media buttons drive 36 percent higher engagement. (Rhythm NewMedia).
• Online video production will account for more than one-third of all online advertising spending within the next five years. (Borrell Associates)
• 76 percent of marketers plan to add video to their sites, making it a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter and blog integration. (Social Media Examiner)
• 92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others. (Invodo)
• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos (YouTube).
• 2 billion video views per week are monetized on YouTube, and every auto-shared tweet results in six new YouTube browsing sessions (ReelSEO).

 How have you incorporated online videos into your business?  Leave your comments below in the “Leave a Reply” section…we’d love to hear from you!

Maybe that comment isn’t fair, but I think we can all agree that whenever we hear about a “Facebook update” we all brace ourselves for the worst. Facebook Timeline…need I say more?

The techies must have been busy in Palo Alto this week as Facebook has thrown us 2 new curveballs: the addition of replies and threaded comments for brands and businesses as well as public Profiles for individuals with more than 10,000 followers. A comment thread WITHIN a comment thread? Isn’t that treading a little too far down the rabbit hole? It’s not mandatory for all Page owners just yet, but starting on July 10th the change will become universal. Starting this week, Page owners can test the waters and get the kinks out before it becomes required. This new Facebook feature was rolled out with the purpose of brands and public Profiles being able to increase interactions with fans and readers. Active-thread sifting is also another feature that is being rolled out, but this is still in beta testing. This function will bring the most active conversations to the top of a comment thread by using an algorithm. 

We smell disaster.

The biggest reason we feel this way is because, for now, the new feature will only be available on desktop, so when viewing the comments on mobile devices, you will not be able to reply. For busy PR people on the go, this is a huge problem when managing client pages. In addition, because of the comment-sifting, all the comments will be out of order, which is a HUGE PAIN for Admins. This presents a BIG problem for Pages who have hundreds of comments (think big brands like Pepsi or Johnson & Johnson) as there is no way to see which comments are new without reading through the whole thread. However, there are some perks. According to Facebook, Page Admins can choose to make the default for new comments entered either “visible to everyone” or “has limited visibility” on the site (i.e., the comment is only visible to the commenter and their friends), to help mitigate irrelevant content. Admins can also blacklist words and ban users. If a new comment is published from a banned user or contains a blacklisted word, this comment will automatically have limited visibility.

Currently, Huffington Post has been testing the comment thread and a screenshot can be seen here:

TechCrunch describes how the new function will work and some of the benefits Pages and Profiles will gain from it: “Direct replies will serve a couple of purposes on the social network. For one, it will give those Page and Profile owners more ways to use their pages. For example, they can use them to run Q&A sessions or informal polls about different topics or ideas. This will also potentially mean more time spent by users on these pages — something that benefits both Facebook and the Page/Profile owners. It also gives Facebook a little more interactive functionality that brings it closer to the kind of direct contact you get in Twitter, or the open forum feeling you get in Reddit.”

While no one can argue that Facebook has revolutionized PR and marketing, sometimes bigger isn’t always better. I yearn for the days of Facebook’s simplicity, when it was all wall posts and pictures of you taking Jell-o shots with your college roommates at your favorite dive bar in 2003. When “Poking” was a social norm and even a way to flirt with someone you liked. A time before future employers were creeping your profile and your social networking movements/interests were being tracked by Facebook/advertisers like a scene from Zero Dark Forty.

Le sigh. We can only wait and see what new “improvements” lay on the horizon….

Another PR crisis for Lululemon Athletica? You don’t say! (read our 2011 post about Lululemon here)

This Albany marketing firm was surprised to learn that the yoga clothes powerhouse ran into trouble this week when it was forced to recall yoga pants for one reason: the company’s black Luon pants were too sheer and practically transparent when ladies were bending over and doing yoga in them. This is even more detrimental for a company that has such a strong reputation in matters of quality that they can get away with charging $100 for a pair of yoga pants and $60 for a tank top. As a result of the recall, the brand will be hit hard with a $60 million loss in sales. To make matters worse, the pants that had to be recalled represented 17% of the total women’s bottom stock for the company.

Customer’s immediately took to Facebook and Twitter to bash the company. One fan quipped on the Lululemon Facebook page  “this is exactly what I was warning you about months ago Lululemon! Don’t change the material/quality of your product to cut costs. Thanks for cheapening the brand!” Not only has Lululemon had to deal with customer backlash, but because it is a publicly owned company, it had shareholders to answer to. On a conference call that took place on Thursday of this week, Lululemon’s chief executive Christine Day explained that the pants had passed many quality-assurance tests, which left the company clueless to the problem. This is when the finger-pointing started. On the conference call, Day explained that it was the textile company’s fault that the fabric was defective. Eclat Textile Co. of Taiwan, the company that supplied Lululemon with the Luon fabric, fired back in the Wall Street Journal saying the clothes it shipped weren’t the issue. “All shipments to Lululemon went through a certification process which Lululemon had approved,” Eclat Chief Financial Officer Roger Lo said in an interview with the newspaper. “All the pants were manufactured according to the requirements set out in the contract with Lululemon.”

It seems that Lululemon was caught with their pants down (whomp whomp).

We applaud Lululemon for how it dealt with the recall as it was going on. In the first hours of the recall, Lululemon posted on their blog about the situation explaining how important quality is to the company. They explained that “we want you to Down Dog and Crow with confidence and we felt these pants didn’t measure up. We keenly listen to your feedback and it is paramount to us that you know we’re listening. We are 100 percent committed to doing the right thing for our guests and living our standards. It is with these intentions in mind that we’ve pulled the affected product from our floors and website.” The company promised that customers who bought the defective yoga pants could head to their local Lululemon store to return them for a full refund or exchange them.

But not until they bent over, which apparently is the only way to test the product. “The truth of the matter is the only way you can actually test for the issue is to put the pants on and bend over,” said Day. “Just putting the pants on themselves doesn’t solve the problem. It passed all of the basic metric tests and the hand-feel is relatively the same, so it was very difficult for the factories to isolate the issue, and it wasn’t until we got in the store and started putting it on people that we could actually see the issue.”

So customers are being subjected to a “bend over” test? When we first heard this, we thought customers were joking when they said they were asked to do such a ridiculous thing. What a kick in the pants when all you’re trying to do it return your faulty yoga gear! After numerous customer complaints about the bend over test, Lululemon has changed its tune when it comes to customer returns. A spokesperson from the company told PR Daily that “all stores are accepting returns on women’s black luon bottoms purchased after March 1st, no questions asked. However, for current product on the floor, our educators are making suggestions to guests (trying on new pants at the store), to mimic the activity they would be doing in the pants ensure they are comfortable with the level of coverage. You can’t actually tell the luon is sheer just by looking at it, touching it or even trying to put your hand through it. It’s truly only when the weave is stretched 4 ways (eg. when in downward dog) that transparency becomes obvious.”

Well, maybe we won’t have to bend over after all, but we’ve got our eye on you Lululemon. Don’t make me think twice before I buy you overpriced, glorious running gear!

* I take full responsibility for all my cheesy puns in this article.

PR and marketing folks like the ladies of this Albany marketing agency loved the Tweetdeck app because it allowed us to post real-time content for clients on multiple platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, simultaneously. In an effort to streamline the service that Tweetdeck provides, they posted on their blog that “we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

So what does Tweetdeck have in store for users in the future? They said that over the past 18 months, the Tweetdeck team has been building a “fast and feature-rich” web application for modern browsers and a Google Chrome app. The Chrome app will offer unique features like notifications, a new look and feel, tools like search term autocomplete and search filters to help users find what they’re looking for more quickly. In addition, it will continue to automatically-update Tweet streams so you immediately see the most recent Tweets.

Thankfully PR Daily put together a list of alternatives for PR gurus like us who want to work smarter, not harder.

• HootSuite– One of the most popular Twitter management tools, HootSuite enables you to manage multiple accounts across multiple social platforms. Last September, HootSuite acquired another top TweetDeck alternative, Seesmic.

• Sprout Social– Here’s another popular management tool in which you can schedule posts and get snapshot metrics. It’s not free, nor as cheap as HootSuite, but it’s customizable in ways that HootSuite isn’t.

• SpredFast– This tool markets itself to large brands and caters to them, while Sprout and HootSuite could be just as effective if you were using it for personal account management.

• Crimson Hexagon– Looking for in-depth sentiment metrics to help you determine your overall social strategy? This is absolutely your tool. The depth of information you can mine from Crimson Hexagon is truly awesome.

 Tweetdeck, we are looking forward to what you have in store for us.  Don’t let us down!