Now I don\u2019t know about you and your particular tastes and values and all that good stuff and I am not here to pass judgment on anyone, other than American Apparel that is.<\/p>\n But how in the name of common sense can you send an email like this out during such a tragic situation where oh by the way, people lost their lives? (guess you can tell by now what side of the aisle I fall on in the brilliant or boneheaded debate)<\/p>\n Seriously? Bored during the storm?<\/p>\n Apparently I was not alone in my complete disdain for this as the Twittersphere lit up in disgust. Here\u2019s a sampling:<\/p>\n Hard to pick my favorite from the above Tweets but I would have to go with\u00a0Brian Clark\u2019s for this decision had to be made by someone of such inexperience, right?<\/p>\n Some even went so far as to include a screenshot of the actual email just to drive home their point even further:<\/p>\n Is It A Crisis If You Actually Initiate The Crisis?<\/strong><\/p>\n Way back in January I wrote a piece\u00a0Crisis Management: The Real Test Of A Brand In The Social Media Space?<\/a><\/p>\n Now the premise of that article was how a brand, business, company, whatever handles a crisis that is not of their doing OR if if were of their doing how they respond to the crisis and in particular how they respond in the social media world.<\/p>\n Last check of both their\u00a0Facebook\u00a0and Twitter accounts I saw no mention of the Hurricane Sandy sale and no remorse whatsoever.<\/p>\n Fine. It is totally their call to respond or not.<\/p>\n But something tells me that Mr. Trump is not right when he says there\u2019s no such thing as over exposure or too much public relations or whatever. If your brand is cast in a negative light \u2013 and the aforementioned Tweets are just a sampling of the backlash, don\u2019t you owe it to not only your loyal customers but to everyone to respond in some fashion?<\/p>\n Oh Wait, This Just In<\/strong> Whew. Thank goodness.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s see what an\u00a0American Apparel spokesperson told\u00a0Fashionista<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course we\u2019d never mean to offend anyone and when we put the email out yesterday it came from a good place.\u201d The motivation, the retailer explained, \u201cis that retail stores are the lifeline of a brand like ours so when they are closed, we need to come up with ways to make up for that lost revenue. People forget how expensive it is to run a Made in USA brand like American Apparel and if we made a mistake here it came from the good place of trying to keep the machine going\u2013for the sake of our employees and stakeholders.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Came from a good place?\u2019<\/p>\n What place was that exactly and how in the world was it good?<\/p>\n Oh that\u2019s right you did all of this (the Hurricane Sandy sale) to keep your doors open so you could sell more merchandise and keep your employees employed otherwise you would have to lay them off which means they couldn\u2019t afford to buy their kids the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip for Christmas this year.<\/p>\n And the fact that they live by the \u201cMade in USA\u201d credo makes this even more galling as they took advantage of an American tragedy that killed Americans!<\/p>\n Ok, your turn.<\/p>\n Weigh in. Chime in. Jump in.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t care. Just tell me what you think of all this.<\/p>\n Sources:\u00a0Mashable<\/a>,\u00a0Fashionista<\/a><\/p>\n Named one of the\u00a0Top 100 Influencers In Social Media<\/a>\u00a0(#41) by Social Technology Review and a\u00a0Top 50 Social Media Blogger<\/a>\u00a0by Kred,\u00a0Steve Olenski<\/a>\u00a0is a\u00a0<\/em>senior content strategist at\u00a0Responsys<\/a>,\u00a0a leading global provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s not often I have cause to quote this person but in this particular article in this particular context, something this person said (and in fact wrote a book with the same title) seems quite appropriate, at least depending on which side of the American Apparel Hurricane Sandy debate. The quote is \u201cThere is no … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,1383],"tags":[1772,25,1774,1773,32,1762,1029,1653],"class_list":["post-4494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-steveolenski","tag-american-apparel","tag-brand","tag-email-marketing","tag-hurricane-sandy","tag-marketing","tag-responsys","tag-social-media-marketing","tag-steve-olenski"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4495,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions\/4495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cdn2.business2community.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/american-apparel4.png\")
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\nApparently someone at American Apparel had the foresight to respond.<\/p>\n