TidyCat's Social Media Team Stops a Stink Over Its #lifestinks Campaign

TidyCats latest ad campaign spans online and offline to get consumers sharing about what stinks in their lives. But one of their ads created its own stink. To the brands' credit, they were listening and responded in less than 24 hours to stop a possible catfight with consumers.

Billboards localize the campaign by referencing what stinks in each market. I'm imagining traffic in Los Angeles, rain in Seattle and there are plenty of opportunities for the NYC subway. These examples are all harmless, even humorous, locally relevant and make TidyCats' point that #lifestinks.

Don't Trash the the Nati
If you were cooking up the ads for each market, would you make a joke about a city's neighborhood? In this case, a Cincinnati neighborhood that Wikipedia will tell you:

• has a rich history
• serious art community
• the most Italianate architecture in the United States
• and has been compared to Greenwich Village, NYC; Savannah, Georgia; Charlseton, South Carolina and New Orleans French Quarter?

As a proud resident of Cincinnati, I'm one of more than a few locals that aren't happy about the billboard. Tony Blankemeyer tipped me off to this bad ad on Friday night. And while the ad clearly sucks, I'm pleased to note TidyCats is taking steps to rectify the situation. After more than a few comments across Facebook, Twitter and the TidyCats campaign site, the brand replied less than 19 hours after I first saw the billboard.

"We appreciate your comments, Kevin. Our billboard mentioning OTR was meant to be humorous. We understand that to many of you, it wasn't. We will be taking fast action to correct our error. Please accept our apologies. - TidyCats Team "

Listen, Learn and Build Loyal Fans
This is a reminder of the importance of social listening and having a response plan in place to engage with consumers and address any unforseen concerns. It doesn't matter if social media is part of a brand campaign. In this case, it was an offline billboard that drew well-deserved ire. Social media is simply where the complaints took place.

TidyCats showed they were listening and taking action against a campaign that was raising a serious stink with Cincinnatians. And in in doing so, they stand to create more friends than foes. Full Disclosure: I'm a dog person. But I'm a fan of TidyCats now based on how this misstep was handled -- and over a holiday weekend no less.

Consumers will still vent their frustrations. But by acting quickly, TidyCats avoided consumers getting organized and the resulting brand pile on that can take place. It makes it much tougher for a brand to change the tone of the conversation.

Comments

[Mark Miller]

Although their original campaign was offensive, you make a great point about their reaction Kevin. Quick and decisive action speak volumes about TidyCat's actual intent. Allowing time for angry local citizens to organize could have been catastrophic.

This is a great lesson to PR and marketing teams about how important it is to consistently monitor social media and all feedback mechanisms. Yes, even on holiday weekends.

[Maggie]

This is why it is so important for companies to have an active social media strategy. Without this, TidyCats might not have caught on to the upset experienced by the consumers. This is also a good example of a crisis-management plan gone right. Although TidyCats made a mistake, its fast reaction to change the billboard did the least amount of damage possible in that situation. The quick reaction time also allowed for a lot of consumers to not take notice of the ad. Social media monitoring allows companies to take advantage and do damage control on events that could help and hinder the company.

[http://www.infinitechusa.net/blog/2012/04/10/how-to-end-a-phone-contract-early-8-ideas/#comment-4040]

The fact that the company was able to take such immediate response to an advertisement campaign that did not set well with its social media audience speaks volumes. I agree with Maggie that their crisis-management was right on target.

[Michele Aki]

The crisis management was quick and they admitted their mistakes and promise to change. But any act of making fun of other people/things that could be offensive is not something one should do anyway. It's important to have in mind that people make different interpretations and being tactful about the content of a message is key to the success of any campaign.

[Liz Floore]

I applaud TidyCats for how quickly it responded to a budding social media problem. Listening and responding to customer complaints or concerns about a product or advertisement on social media platforms is a policy that every company should employ. Social media teams are becoming more and more popular, and those jobs didn’t even exist five years ago. One thing that TidyCats can take away from this is that they should have done more research on the area in Cincinnati that they were referring to in their ad and found out what the residents of that area think of where they live. However, on the plus side, TidyCats can walk away from this knowing that their social media team took the proper actions to prevent any brand damage from this campaign.

[Caloundra Bookkeeping Service]

Notwithstanding some offensive implications of the campaign, it just serves as a wake up call for those involve in marketing and PR sectors to checkout their use of social media. It is important that we become more than careful in making social media as a marketing tool in promoting your business.

[My Own SEO - Where to Start]

Last year, you educated yourself about social media and the opportunities that it offers you as a business owner. Your efforts and needs have grown dramatically since then. You now need a team of social media experts in-house.

[Do you need a 1300 number?]

Tidy Cats is excited to come to the rescue and solve some of life's stinkiest situations," said Rebecca Schulz, Tidy Cats Senior Brand Manager. "Tidy Cats Odor Erasers helps with the PU in your litter box and home, and we're excited for the PU Patrol to travel across America and help with the PU in people's lives.

[nlp neuro linguistic]

No PU from this View: Life stinks when you can't explore every facet of New York City. On behalf of Tidy Cats, 1,000 New Yorkers and tourists will be able to visit the Empire State Building for free on April 18 and see the city from a bird's eye view.

[My Own SEO - Where to Start]

A consumer who does not use the #lifestinks hashtag or visit nomorepu.com is missing the ultimate campaign message of the campaign – which is that Tidy Cats guarantees their product. Having not shared to #lifestinks, I only found out about the guarantee, while I was researching the campaign for this blog.

[Tamara from Resources for Blog Writers]

The failure of all companies to leverage the actual listening power of social networking is a major proper error. If social media was created to be ‘marketing like a conversation’ then surely the cornerstone of a good conversation would be to listen first.

[Dave from Fax to Email Australia]

As entrepreneurs, we’re often focused over the next best way to make more leads for our business using web 2. However, it’s important we learn to expand this focus to view social media as possessing a much wider scope for the business, including using it effectively as the customer service platform; your decide one key element of carrying out this is active listening.