Agency’s Word of Mouth Ethics Lapse Leaks into Media

Robert Scoble keeps telling us that a blogger with five readers can get their story picked up around the world, if other bloggers and media pick up on it.

That seems to be the case of university student Rosie Siman, who blogged October 8 about some unethical activity in "Target Rounders," a word-of-mouth group of fans of the department store Target.  In a newsletter, the group’s organizers had suggested that members not mention their affiliation on a Facebook group set up for fans of Target.

As in, "Keep it like a secret."

After Rosie called out the ethical lapse, she got an apology from the AKQA agency, which ran the Facebook campaign for Target. But instead of openly admitting their mistake and moving on, the agency worsened the situation by deleting and editing posts to the Facebook group.

I can just imagine the sighs of relief when it was reported that the agency had contained the potential fallout from the error.

A few days later, her public relations professor, Kaye Sweetser,  blogged about the incident, citing three critical acts of deceit, deceit and deceit.

Here we are almost two months later, and the story’s still making the rounds of blogs and news outlets.

That’s not containment. That’s throwing viral gasoline on social media fire.

A simple "Oops, we goofed. We promise not to do that again," would have been sufficient.

Tags: business, retail, stores, target, facebook, public relations, campaign, word of mouth, WOM, viral