Target: Are you paying attention to social media?

Last time I checked, a search for Target‘s house brand, Trutech, resulted in a post I wrote from May of 2007 (Why you should NOT buy Target’s Trutech brand) being the #1 search result. Today, I noticed that it had fallen to #2 and that a “Target.com Official Site” sponsored link now appears. Perhaps that’s related, but maybe not.

My friend and Minnov8 cohort, Graeme Thickins, recap of last nights Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association social media panel (which I couldn’t attend) was fabulous. Best Buy, Fingerhut, Gage Marketing, General Mills and Target were all represented and had insightful things to say about what they were all respectively up to when it came to social media.

At last evening’s event, Thickins reported that a metric was presented that Target’s Facebook page has 33,000 members. While that’s interesting, that post I wrote has had ~75,000 pageviews (almost all unique visitors) and dozens of mostly negative comments.

I’ve reached out on several occasions to the woman that handles PR for Target’s Trutech brand; tried to connect with the video buyer; and in general reach out. Not to make a fuss, but to see if there is any awareness that they’re selling electronics that — God forbid you break the remote — can’t be operated with any of the dozens of universal remotes Target sells. Seems like something the video buyer might want to know and maybe fix while calming  the Target “guests” down, heh? (just read some of those comments and you’ll see people are quite agitated).

The Minneapolis StarTribune had an article about people posting negative feedback on their Facebook area which Target took to heart and jumped on, but is Target completely clueless and unaware of the tools to scan other social media and to address obvious shortcomings?