Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Absolut Vodka Gets “Grade of C” in Handling Web 2.0 PR Fiasco, So Far

On April 16th I posted a somewhat whimsical comparison of Americans and Chinese to my blog. It was a half serious political analysis; really it was a reaction to the reaction of AdAge and other US bloggers to a recent Absolut Vodka Ad that ran in a Mexican magazine.Just hours after the blog entry I started receiving angry anonymous posts. I decided to leave 4 of them up there. Nothing wrong with a little spice on a discussion board/blog. Afterall, my company, Anderson Analytics, often helps clients understand their consumers by web-scraping/screen-scraping pages of the web and text mining the results.

Often our clients are struggling with similar issues Absolut is struggling with in terms of what to allow on a company run blog or discussion board. My suggestion is usually to allow controversy and disagreement. Allow immediate posting without censoring content too much. If you succeed in building a healthy online/Consumer Generated Media (CGM) community around your brand/product, why not turn moderation over to the heavy users of the site. Flyertalk is one excellent example of how a company allows their visitors to moderate discussions on their behalf.

Now, looking back at the Absolut ‘Fiasco’. Absolut has a blog where their head of PR has posted various apologies for the Mexico incident. They started out somewhat mild and possibly even insincere, and are now more desperate in tone. On April 16th alone, when I fort blogged about the Mexican Ad, they had changed their apology 2x.

OK, so here’s what I think Absolut is doing correctly and incorrectly. As mentioned earlier, I do think that allowing US bloggers to complain freely about the ad on their blog is correct. However, I question the wisdom of the various apologies for the Ad — AND, while allowing bloggers to complain about your product or brand is one thing, allowing all kinds of obscenities, curse words, hate speech, immigration paranoia on a corporate website? NO, I do not feel this is necessary. The web is anonymous, and serious complaints about a product is one thing, but allowing any idiots post equal weight is another. Absolut should remove these posts, but could still allow serious arguments about the wisdom of the Ad in question.

I’m giving Absolut PR a C- for CGM (Consumer Generated Media) management so far. What grade would you give them, and why?

-Tom