Retail Politics
It’s and election year and fists are flying. No, not in the streets of battleground states, but in that new forum for direct democracy: Facebook.
Less than a month after the social explosion that surrounded the Susan G. Komen foundation’s decision to discontinue its grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening services, and just three months after Lowe’s stepped into the political buzz saw when it pulled ads from the TV show “All-American Muslim,” a new battle has broken out.
As with the Komen controversy, sponsors — including many retailers — are in the crosshairs.
Following Rush Limbaugh’s multi-day screed against Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who had testified before Congress concerning the birth control provision of the Affordable Care Act (see Time and Forbes), a barely civil debate concerning the red-hot topics of women’s health, religious freedom, freedom of speech, reproductive rights and all issues red and blue is taking place in the most unlikely of forums – the Facebook pages of ProFlowers and Sleep Number Beds.
In fact, ProFlowers has broken the record score for “fan” engagement by a retail brand (as measured by Media Logic’s Retail Social Juice Index). And that number is expected to go off the charts tomorrow. It is, perhaps, not a stat they sought (or certainly not in this fashion, anyway), but there it is.
To their credit, most if not all brands affected by the latest controversy are doing a much better job engaging fans and managing comments than did Lowe’s last December, but that has not kept people from rushing to the fight.
It is likely that during the run-up to the November elections more battles will break out. It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s new Timeline for brands (which puts most fan posts a click or two away from the initial page view) does anything to tamp down these proxy battles. Facebook engagement has spiked for Sears, an early adopter of Timeline and a sometimes sponsor of Limbaugh, though not to the degree it has spiked for ProFlowers or Sleep Number Beds.
