Target’s Web site, as you probably know by now, included an ad for marijuana. The problem with the server caused a stir in the blogosphere, with some calling it a PR crisis and others insisting that it wasn’t a big deal (like Jeremy Zawodny, who writes, “It’s a stupid mistake. Are we too screwed up to realize that companies are composed of people and that people sometimes make mistakes? I don’t know about you, but I see really big differences between this and the Kryptonite ‘pick a lock with a ball point pen’ crisis. (Hint: It actually was a crisis.)”

I’m inclined to agree with Zawodny. I’ve said here before that we tend to fling the word “crisis” around way too freely. Still, it wouldn’t have hurt Target to be on top of the problem, and Enterprise RSS has some ideas about what the retailer should have done. Interestingly, if a PR department acknowledges the blogosphere exists, then the actions are nothing startling:

1. Someone associated with the company should have been tracking web and weblog comments with a keyword feed on ‘Target’
2. When the first bad buzz started, a Target rep needed to reach out to a couple of the key commentators and let them know what the company was doing to correct the problem.  Comment on the post or posts; use a trackback; send emails.

That’s exactly what any halfway decent communicator would have recommended a decade ago (and still should) about potentially damaging coverage in newspapers. The more things change…