Let’s Just Chill
In a world full of hate, fear-mongering, and uncertainty about the future, it’s nice to have a moment of pure, simple humour. Happiness surely ensued when Chili’s, the American chain restaurant prominently featured in the show The Office brilliantly replied to Jenna Fischer (aka Pam on the show).
The tweet instantly attracted major attention, amassing over 125k retweets and 390k likes (and counting). For some context, on the show, Pam gets banned from the chain after stealing drinks from other people’s tables at the Dundies, her workplace’s (Dunder Mifflin Paper Company) annual awards ceremony.
Chili’s reacted pretty quickly with their content output (less than 24 hours later); this semi-immediate response helps point out that their response was anything but canned. Even if they planned the exchange with Fischer ahead of time, it came off as completely authentic and light-hearted.
Now, some might say this planned content lacks relevance, as the series ended several years ago. Those people need to be introduced to memes. While the characters no longer exist beyond their final episodes, they live on forever through internet culture and the wonderful world of memes. The Office memes have taken off (they have their own page on knowyourmeme.com) and they don’t seem to be dying down any time soon. In fact, Jenna Fischer’s tweet is pretty meme-like itself.
The way their response was delivered was truly creative, crafted, and custom. Presenting the response as an official press release was a stroke of genius… or maybe I just love the show too much and am overly impressed. Regardless, their personalized message required research and consideration. The actual release (which can be found here: http://brinker.mediaroom.com/PamBeeslyHalpert) brings up a real quote from the show, the facts of the moments leading up to her “ban”, and correctly indicates how many years it had been effective for. All the checkboxes for effective planned content have been ticked with this one.
The authenticity of the moment earned its fair share of attention as the company received over 45k retweets and 74k likes. These numbers would have likely been significantly lower had the company not noticed her tweet (after all, she didn’t tag them in any way) or had they delayed their response. Their planned content was a textbook social media win.
The Office fan community definitely took notice, as indicated by the hundreds of thousands of likes/retweets/replies on all ends, but they weren’t the only ones.
Not only did Fischer notice the reply (and make a relevant and humorous response); her TV husband John Krasinski aka Jim Halpert was on board, too. All of this positive attention towards the brand really added up in numbers and in support. If you go through the replies on the tweets, people are eating this stuff up. Did this directly correlate into more sales at the restaurant? Maybe, maybe not. What we can be sure of is that these exchanges have created a positive and lasting impression on potential consumers that they may carry with them for quite some time.
