Member Article

Greggs brilliant use of social media

You’ve got to love Greggs the Bakers. Feeder of the tired commuter, provider of hot, short-crust joy, they’re one of the North East’s top exports and a regional symbol to rival the Tyne bridge, the Sage and the Angel of The North.

They’ve long been synonymous with crowd pleasing pasties (especially their festive bakes, which should be returning to shelves very soon) but this week Britain’s biggest bakery chain proved that they can also cook up a mean social media response in a pinch.

It all started when some bright spark on twitter realised that searching for ‘Greggs’ on Google returned a less than ideal result; a spoof logo which reads ’GREGGS Providing s**t to scum for over 70 years“.

Yes, it’s a not-particularly funny parody from god knows how long ago but some mischievous gremlin in the Google machine saw it rise to the status of official signifier and pretty soon Greggs were inundated, shared and viral.

What followed next though was a master-class in handling an escalating incident (we shan’t call it a crisis as it never reached a critical point) and negative chatter that is sure to make it onto many a PR degree syllabus in the coming months.

First of all, there was the earnest way in which Greggs set their tone somewhere between an independent start-up company and a mate who has bemusedly forgot where they left their keys. Not only that, but they also fed off the support of their friendlier twitter users, chatting with them and winning them over with a disarming directness.

That was only part one of the plan though, with the following interaction with Google, offering free doughnuts, pasties and sausage rolls through eye catching, shareable pictures, providing one of the best examples of corporate interplay that you’re likely to see this year, with sweet treats, bribery, mascots and even the Simpsons’ famous doughnut connoisseur, Homer, popping up in the conversation in the few hours it took for Google to sort out the issue.

So, bravo to Greggs, then. Even if the news outlets are still taking the angle that they were somehow left red-faced, anybody who followed the story as it unfolded knows that they handled (and ultimately solved) a tricky situation with style, ingenuity and grace. Let’s all raise a sausage roll to our favourite bakers!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Bradley O’Mahoney Public Relations .