Harry vs. Boeing

There is nothing more enticing for the media than using children to attract the public. Adorable little Harry Winsor mailed Boeing his idea of what a perfect airplane would look like, in hopes the company would consider his idea and create this plane. Cold Boeing ignored the fact that Harry is just a small kid with a BIG imagination and sent him a standard letter stating  that Boeing "does not accept unsolicited ideas" because " the time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained".  There are many ways to look at this situation. For starters, Boeing needs to find a better way to communicate with its consumers. In an age where global communication can happen in a matter of instants and online censorship is not regulated, companies need to be extra careful in how they handle their image. If this situation would have happened 20 years ago, which I am sure it did, not many consumers would have known about it. Many companies are still not up to date on how to handle their PR in this new age of Web 2.0 and this reflections are seen on cases like this one. Of course it does not help that Harry's dad is the CEO of an adverstising agency, uses crowdsourcing and like millions of people, he has a blog where he comments on everyday relevant situations like this one. His message was instantly transmitted to all his contacts and it reached The New York Times who, of course, wrote an article. Maybe Mr. Windsor saw this as the perfect opportunity to advertise his ad agency. After all, free publicity does not cost anything. Moreover, this Pandora box gives other airline companies the opportunity to use this case in their next ad campaign with tag lines that could read "fly with us, we are a family company" or "we value our customers, even if their imaginations are up in the air". Boeing will learn its lesson and its image might get damaged for a short period but it will recoup soon enough.

 Bottom line: this is a global learning lesson in guarding our image. Now more than ever we have to be more sensitive to what we say and how we say it, because there could be a blog post somewhere on the web that could turn into a newspaper article that could generate controversy and end up in someone else's blog. :)

Fashion's Night Out and Social Media

Hi there,

I could not have a better introductory post that relates more to this blog. As many of you may know, yesterday was Fashion's Night Out. This event was started last year to boost the Fashion economy in NYC. Due to last year's success, the event was expanded to the entire world. As an event coordinator, I had the opportunity to experience first hand the power of social networking. Within a matter of weeks we received an overwhelming amount of RSVPs to yesterday's event. Through social networking, everyone knew about this event. Facebook helped a lot but the main source of RSVPs came through electronic evite to our customer's and contacts. Social networking generated word of mouth which in turn resulted in more people knowing about the event. Therefore, do not underestimate the power of social networking and EMAIL. A strong database and networking guarantees success, even if for just one night. :)

More information on FNO

http://www.fashionsnightout.com/