Overview
On September 16, 2009, the Humane Society of America released a hidden camera video of cruel conditions inside an egg-supplier to the IHOP chain, and urged viewers to send letters to the CEO of IHOP to implement cage-free egg supplier policies. We wanted to measure the impact this campaign had online. Did it catch fire? Did it create a groundswell of support? Did it create activity and excitement in others?
Launching the campaign
The Humane Society's campaign was launched on September 16th with a video taken by a smaller nonprofit, Compassion Over Killing. The launch elements included:- posting the video on YouTube;
- posting a campaign call to action to their website (a letter to IHOP CEO Julie Stewart asking IHOP to start using cage free eggs);
- posting links on both their Twitter and Facebook presences;
- posting a note on their President's blog;
- emailing their membership; and
- finding and posting comments on individual blog postings that mention IHOP, even if they were unrelated to the egg controversy (such as ones that mention excitement about a new IHOP opening).
Response from IHOP
On September 16 the Humane Society said that IHOP responded to them with a new section of its website, "Social Responsibility" that contains a new section entitled "Cruelty-Free Food" with the claim "It’s important to state clearly that we are against the cruel treatment of animals used in the production of food for our restaurants."
Josh Balk at the Humane Society insisted that this page was created after they launched their cage-free campaign, but was not able to produce evidence of that. Jennifer Morrisson of IHOP said that she could not put a firm date on when this page was created. If accurate, this would be the only outward response IHOP executed in reaction to the Humane Society's claims.
Results
Internally, Humane Society staff probably grade this effort by three measures:- Can they force IHOP to change its egg-supplier's practices?
- How effective is it at attracting new members and donations?
- How much attention does it garner online?
Impact On IHOP's Business Practices
Apart from this one statement, IHOP has made no announcements about its egg supplier's practices. Josh Balk at the Humane Society said HSUS was in discussions with IHOP before they launched their campaign, so presumably they will be in discussions again.
However, addressing the Humane Society directly and publicly would direct more attention to a conflict that IHOP would probably prefer stay not newsworthy. This strategy appears to be working to date, and has avoided fueling the Humane Society's campaign. In fact there is remarkably little press coverage given the graphic nature of the video. Apparently secretly-filmed footage no longer carries the publicity impact it used to.Attention Garnered Online
Online, the reaction was stronger, but still not as large as anyone probably expected. There are a number of ways to measure impact and popularity of such a campaign online. Popular campaigns will be shared, echoed, and forwarded through social media. Here are a few ways in which campaigns that build excitement create measurable data trails that we measured.
YouTube views
A hidden camera video of poor living conditions for chickens ought to be the most popular asset of the campaign. A five minute version was posted on September 16th
A shorter two and a half minute piece was posted on September 21
Both videos together only have less than 11,000 views and never broke into popular viral territory. As you can see from these graphs, both stopped getting significant views within ten days of their posting.
Digg votes
Digg.com is a well-known conduit for popular word-of-mouth topics. Hot topics such as Kanye's interruption at a music awards show easily garners thousands of digg votes as users pass around the links or videos in question, and then create additional follow-on pages. As you can see from this graph, the campaign was submitted the week after launch, and then only received one digg vote. This is a poor result.Google search pollution
Invading a brand's top ten google results for their Google vanity search (a search on their name) is another way to measure if your campaign has broken into the public consciousness. A search on the phrase "IHOP" shows the Humane Society campaign linked at #12 for the Google Search Results. This is pretty good. With an SEO campaign, they are likely to be able to break into the top 10, which should get the attention of IHOP's management.
Breaking into the top 10 of a brand that cares is a surefire way to resolve an issue. There are legions of stories of people that had an unsatisfying experience with a company, blogged about it, broke into the top 10, and then had their issues resolved quickly. This strategy should work for the Humane Society.As an aside, note how IHOP's search traffic works:
See those spikes? Those are Saturdays and Sundays, every single one of them, and the trend goes back this way for months, possibly forever. People search for IHOP in extremely predictable ways.
Wikipedia entry pollution
Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative sites online. If you have a Wikipedia page, it will show up in the top 10 search results for your name, and be difficult to dislodge. Beginning on October 1, an 11 day Wikipedia edit war began over a new section labeled "Controversies", with various editors and contributors arguing over the adequate sourcing of the claims on the page. Early versions of the page read like bragging from animal-rights advocates, citing entirely unsubstantiated claims that "Tens of thousands of consumers called and emailed IHOP to urge the company to switch some of its eggs to cage-free" without any independent source to verify it.
On October 6th a user deleted the entire Controversies section, which was rewritten 5 days later on October 11th with only verifiable information, as it remains available today. A longer examination of the Wikipedia edit war over IHOP's entry is available at, "The battle over IHOP's Wikipedia entry, and how you can protect your own"Facebook page
The largest IHOP Facebook fan page has 47,000 fans and a wall for users to post comments. It has a strong showing of complaints of people asking IHOP to use cage-free eggs. During the Wikipedia edit war there were accusations that IHOP was deleting complaints from their wall, but this was deleted because the claim could not be verified. The default page users are directed to when they come to the IHOP fan page is not the wall, however, it's an NFL promotion, and viewers of the Wall only see IHOP announcements unless they click 'Just Fans', in which case they see this:In addition a new IHOP fan page is slowly growing, with just under 5,000 fans. This page appears to be populated by people who don't think much of the animal cruelty accusations and love IHOP's food.
Online petition
The Humane Society announced their web-based petition to IHOP reached 10,000 members on October 8th, about three weeks from the start of the campaign. A smaller Twitter-based petition has 138 signatories as of today, and is unlikely to grow significantly more. While that number isn't likely to cause IHOP's management or franchisees to rush back to the negotiating table, it's probably enough to get their attention.
Google Search Insights
Another great way to judge whether a PR effort has influenced the nation's zeitgeist is whether it drives people online to search for the topic using Google. I examined Google searches for "cage free eggs" and found two interesting things: 1. The searches are all primarily from California. 2. There is no discernible spike in search relevance during the time of the campaign. There's a small increase at best and its effect has already dissipated.
How should you grade the campaign and the PR responses within?
For the Humane Society, the campaign seems to be popular with their members, but it has not achieved the breakout status that would allow it to grow legs and storm the Internet, angering and recruiting tens of thousands of new donors to the Humane Society's cause. And still, HSUS may be happy that the added pressure the campaign has created may bring IHOP back to the negotiating table to discuss enacting a voluntary cage-free egg policy.
IHOP's PR team has done an excellent job of not feeding the publicity around the Humane Society's campaign. Their silence indicates they don't feel comfortable defending this policy and have no ability to commit to change it anytime soon. If they did, they could announce a change with a timetable, but no such action has come to date.They've neither tried to take the videos down, which would create a Streisand Effect of added attention, nor have they acknowledged the campaign publicly, which would be all that's necessary for the he-said she-said writing tendencies of journalists to let their stories write themselves as the conflict created its own coverage.
To use a poker analogy, given the cards IHOP was dealt, they played their hand to the best possible outcome.
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