Posts RSS« Help us fill Noah’s room with Christmas cards | Main | The mustache is making a comeback thanks to #movember »
Doing’ good in the neighborhood and a lesson about perception
By Justin Goldsborough | November 10th, 2009
Perception is a powerful thing. It’s one of the points I try to get across to clients on a daily basis. What people are saying about your brand right now is how you’re being perceived. And these days your brand reputation is evolving in real time. I just saw it happen.
I was struggling to decide which cause I wanted to write about tonight. I kept thinking I should do a post related to Veteran’s day. But I already did one about eleveneleven.org last week. So I decided I wasn’t going to do another one.
So I started looking for causes ideas in my tweet stream. That’s when I saw a tweet from @scottmonty that vets and active military duty eat free tomorrow at Applebee’s. Cool promotion — full disclosure, I used to work for Applebee’s and I definitely gained my appreciation for causes and community service there — but not really a “big deal” cause, is it? So I retweeted it but moved on.
A few minutes later, three people I really respect on Twitter — @arikhanson, @prtini, @valeriesimon and @sonnygill — had retweeted the same message. Boy this Applebee’s Veteran’s Day promotion is really catching people’s attention. And people I trust are sharing it. Maybe I should write about it. But I’ll keep looking for other causes. It will be my second option.
Five minutes passed. 10 minutes. And I saw the #applebeesvets message retweeted at least five more times. So I checked out Tweetreach and the tweet had reached more than 77,000 people. In fact, it had reached more than that because Tweetreach only calculates the reach of 50 tweets unless you pay for a full report.
Then I went to the Facebook fan page to see what people we’re saying about the promotion. It was most definitely a “big deal” cause to them:
At this point I felt compelled to blog the #applebeesvets story. That’s how perception works. From nice promotion to tweet gaining traction to big deal cause. From something I’d heard about to something I wanted to be a part of.
So that’s how I what I first saw as a free meal became a cause I couldn’t imagine not writing about. The whole story came across very different through the eyes of several “someones like me.” When it got to be less about just Applebee’s the brand and more about how Applebee’s was impacting peoples’ lives, I was hooked.
But in reality, wasn’t this cause always about the difference Applebee’s could make in the lives of veterans, active duty military and their families? That never changed, did it?
The only thing that changed was my perception.
National Blog Posting Month 30 Causes in 30 Days
- Apartment Fund for Daniela’s Family (@davearmano)
- 12for12k (@dannybrown)
- #Iamsovereign Twitter Birthday Project (@jasonstoddard)
- Jaeli’s Syndrome (@AngEngland and @BrandyBrow)
- #GebenGives (@prtini)
- 11-11 Veteran’s Day (@JoeTrippi)
- #stopdiabetes (@JessicaLHansen, @AmDiabetesAssn)
- #noahbiorkman (several thousand people)
- #applebeesvets (@scottmonty, @arikhanson, @valeriesiimon, @prtini, @sonnygill)
Comments are closed.