This Saturday I'm speaking at Barcamp Nashville with my friend Steve Horton from the firm Katcher, Vaughn, and Bailey here in town. Our session is called PR 2.0: The Deer Have Guns Now. A very recent example of the deer (the public, bloggers, and social media in general) having "guns" to fight back now involves a recent case with 3M the manufacturer of Post-It Notes.
The Background
You can read the full story here but basically what happened is that about two years ago some people decided to play a joke on a coworker and put Post-It Notes all over his beloved Jaguar. One of the people uploaded the pictures to his Flickr page and before he knew it thousands of people were interested in this creative practical joke. It got picked up by major blogs like Boing Boing and Digg. ABC News even did a story about it.
The Problem
Several months ago 3M contacted the photographer to ask see if they could use the photos for an back-to-school promotion they were working on for the Fall. The photographer asked a professional photographer friend what a fair licensing fee would be for 3M and when he responded with it a 3M employee said they wouldn't be willing to pay more than what it would cost them to do the photo shoot themselves which was going to be between $750-$1000. The photographer countered with a $2000 license fee and never heard from 3M again.
Then a few months ago people started telling the photographer that they saw his picture at their local Office Depots, Staples, and Office Max stores. It turns out 3M decided to recreate the car and pass it off like the originals. They even have video on their YouTube channel showing them doing it (and note at the beginning of the video they say it's a video of "the Post-It car" not even "a Post-It car.")
To date, this story has been blogged about over 100 times including being covered by well known blogger/author David Meerman Scott. There are hundreds of angry comments for 3M on the blogs and on Digg.com as well.
The Bottom Line
The viral marketing idea 3M was hoping to capitalize on here is blowing up in their face. When you choose to go hunting for new business, new ideas, and new customers in the current online environment don't forget that you can get shot now as well. The traditional mindset for marketers is only that they are the hunters. Being the hunted is an unfamiliar position for them but one they will continue to find themselves in until they better understand the world they now live in.
3M's Opportunity
Ok, so all of that is the bad news for 3M. Frankly, they look like the big bad company that's too cheap to pay a little guy $2,000 for the use of the pictures. The good news for 3M is that they can still come out of this looking all right if they're willing to do a few things.
- First, 3M should apologize. Tell the photographer they're sorry and admit that they were in the wrong there. Even if they weren't legally in the wrong they seem to have ripped off a bit of intellectual property just because they could. There is power in being genuinely sorry.
- Then, 3M should pay the photographer and use the pictures. Whatever the photographer's initial asking price was is what they should pay. Once they do that they should replace the YouTube video with the original pictures and any upcoming printed items that haven't been sent to press yet.
- Finally, 3M should start contacting the bloggers who covered this. This will take some time and effort to do but it will be worth it. Many of the bloggers will likely post about 3M's willingness to take the time to make things right. In the end 3M could really look like a company that learned from it's errors and change the entire conversation. Until then they'll just be the company that told him to take his Post-It Notes and stick it!