Kraft Drops the Ball on Blogger Relations
December 12, 2007 – 6:56 am
Last month, I read the charming story of how the clever folks at Freshbooks sent a customer in the South Pacific some Triscuits that he was craving. Mark Evans wrote about it, and subsequently went to the trouble of notifying Kraft Canada of this story. They didn’t reply for weeks, and when they did they sent a generic, inaccurate response:
It’s clear Kim sent me a Dear Triscuit Consumer letter - the same one that anyone gets when they write to Kraft about Triscuits.
And what really hurts is Kim didn’t even read my blog post because there was no pictures or video involved. And I didn’t send them an attachment because the form on Kraft Canada’s Web site doesn’t let you include attachments.
Finally, Kim didn’t use her own e-mail address. The e-mail came from from Onlineteam@casupport.com, which is just so warm and personal, don’t ya think!
Mark’s right–Kraft missed a great opportunity to create some buzz for their wholly unremarkable products. They could have sent a crate of Triscuits to Freshbooks as a thank you. They could have started a campaign to send crackers to far-flung Triscuit lovers. Heck, they could have launched a new version of Triscuits with, I don’t know, the shapes of foreign countries branded on each cracker.
What did they get instead? At least two negative write-ups on the web that are going to last and last and last.
Thanks to Blair Christensen for the photo.
Tags: blogger outreach, Blogger Relations, canada, kraft, mark evans
