I want to talk this week about building your brand quickly and globally. Elle Darby is a YouTuber with 87,000 subscribers. She approached the White Moose Café and offered exposure on her vlog in exchange for free accommodation. The café wasn’t exactly impressed with Darby or her offer. In fact, all influencers and bloggers have now been blacklisted from their hotel and other premises. As you can probably imagine, this got the internet up in arms both in defence and opposition to the situation.
The letter and response was published online, and a lot of bloggers started posting about it, turning it into an entire angry rant. It’s likely this was the exact response the café’s owner was looking for. For the past week, there’s been an angry buzz about this topic all over social media, which means millions of people who had never heard of this café are now interested in it.
If you check Google Trends, interest in both Elle Darby and White Moose Café has been building every day. Millions of people around the world have now heard of this Irish business, which will likely translate into a great bump to their bottom line, especially via their online shop.
I did a check on their website and it’s got a lot of problems. It’s likely they could sustain that bump if they did some basic fixes, and now is the perfect time to do it while the interest is hot. If you’ve got the kind of brand that can withstand that sort of cheeky interest, it might be something to think about for building interest in your company.
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Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
