Nuts about Nuts

The New York Times wrote a great and fun story about a nut company that just spent a fortune for the domain nuts.com, despite having a wonderful brand to itself and a thriving online business at nutsonline.com. We had a nice debate internally about all the search and brand impact of this decision. Read Abu’s response and all the other fun responses.

I can’t help but be struck by the amazing social opportunities that have been created here for Newark Nuts. If the age of corporate social media has taught us anything, it’s that customers value businesses that are honest, forthright and show their human side. We want to join in this story of their heroic rise, fall, rise — and we wanted to save these nutty nut lovers from falling again. The world is already coming to their aid in the NYT article with tons of free, some good, advice.

Newark Nuts now has a tremendous opportunity to connect this story with their customers. So why no mention of the Times coverage on their FB page? Twitter? Blog post?  If they were opportunistic enough to marry their social, PR and search strategies, well, they’d have a home run and would soon be selling peanuts to every baseball lover in America.  And organic quinoa puffs to the rest of us (who knew?).

So often we can be afraid of seizing the opportunity to show our brand’s humanity. But customers love it when we do. We’d love to know – what would you do? What are your challenges in tying your social+PR+search strategies together authentically, and opportunistically?

P.S. I know they want to be called nuts.com. I just can’t bring myself to do it.