Social media can be bitter tweet pill for marketers

7th February 2012, by Dan Clifford

The past few weeks have provided a fantastic insight into big brand perspectives of social media, as well as offering some valuable PR lessons.

An amazing hat-trick of Twitter stories have each highlighted a different consideration to be accounted for when seeding, or responding to, a story.

The first demonstrated how consumer campaigns can gain momentum quickly and powerfully. A decision by LA Fitness to refuse a contract exit route to a financially struggling couple exploded onto the ‘Twittersphere’, forcing an embarrassing climb-down after members threatened a mass boycott.

The second story could be the start of a far different trend, with brands capitalising on the phenomenal followings enjoyed by celebrities and treating their Twitter feeds as another media vehicle. This approach was demonstrated by Snickers when it engaged the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Katie Price and Cher Lloyd to seed short tweet bursts designed to suggest the accounts had been hacked owing to their out of character content.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and, in fairness, you can see why the Snickers marketeers maybe thought this jovial wind up would lead to a series of retweets and new follows. However, it actually led to a follower rebellion against being overtly advertised ‘at’ in a channel they were using to gain information and insight.

Completing the trio is the #McFail of McDonald’s ‘promoted’ campaign to focus on the sharing of sourcing stories under the #McDstories tag. Designed as a way of changing perceptions of the food production process, it was quickly hijacked for the aggregation of horror stories surrounding McDonald’s food and outlets – until the promoted hashtag was withdrawn.

Don’t get me wrong - I am not discouraging brand interaction with social media. Rather, I’m urging a reality check. Social audiences do not take kindly to marketing ploys that offer them nothing but a sales message – but that doesn’t mean they won’t respond to ideas that offer them something in return.

Just check out the parody accounts created for the Inbetweeners characters ahead of the film’s DVD release. Each has around 150k followers and they have them because, although they are selling, they are doing it in a fun, original and interesting way which followers have chosen to enjoy.

This article originally appeared as part of a series for the Birmingham Post.

• Social Media
• PR