Twitter Marketing Fail

As we all know, some business in Australia has done a fail marketing campaign through Facebook and Twitter like the case of Coles and Woolworths. I have just read another interesting article about the fail marketing through Twitter. It is often that companies will try to run their Social Media campaign without much thought about it and what could be the potential risk of using Social Media marketing. Mostly, companies getting their employees to execute their competitions or campaigns who may not have the pre-requisite social media savvy for it to be success. There are some examples on how not to run a social media marketing campaign based from an article.

Fail # 1 - Qantas Australia

Qantas Australia airline come under enormous complaints for a badly executed Twitter campaigns. They were forced to apologize for a twitter competition that gave sport fans tickets for going black face. Their next social media campaign could not have gone worse for the airline, encouraging Twitter users to enter by answering the question provided by Qantas "What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include #QantasLuxury." Here are some of the (humorous) response from the Twitter users: 

• My #QantasLuxury experience would be no matter what time or duration of the flight a proper meal is served a cookie is not a meal its a joke 

•  A plane that doesn’t have an exploding engine! #QantasLuxury

• #QantasLuxury is a massive executive bonus while your workers starve and your former customers choke

• #QantasLuxury is a complimentary cheap hotel room because your cynical airline left you stranded in Adelaide, of all places. Adelaide.

With feedback like this from its customers, it’s not surprising Qantas went awfully quiet during this campaign. After this disaster, even parody Twitter accounts have been set-up (and shut down) such as this one, which is going strong.

Fail #2 – Waitrose UK

A UK based supermarket Waitrose which has a reputation of catering towards the higher end grocery shops also use the #hashtag in Twitter which epically backfiring after Waitrose encouraged the Twitter users to complete the following sentence of: "I only shop at Waitrose because of....#waitrosereasons". The funny responses are:

Waitrose see the comment in the funnier lighter side, but . . .

  

Many are now taking to Twitter to say this was a deliberate social media strategy from Waitrose, any PR is good PR so they say, as it’s certainly encouraged a lot of buzz and chatter on Twitter. However, it’s dubious if this is the case, as more encouragement from the Waitrose Twitter account would have been seen and perhaps even a prize for the funniest Tweet. 

The lesson learned from this mistake is to always be aware of what’s happening in the World, i.e. keeping up with the News, and if something is trending find out more by searching for the Tweets using the hashtag, rather than blindly mentioning without understanding what the noise is about. Lessons can be learned from these examples above, and if you’re a major brand think very carefully before launching a new #hashtag social media event. There are several tools that can help you strategise and plan your campaign as well as management tools to help your analyse and optimise your Twitter channel, such as Hootsuite, VerticalResponse, and FollowerWonk that can cover everything from scheduling through growing the user base and finding users with lots of Klout.

Quick Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be a full time job, it may come into a future that major businesses spend more time on their social media campaigns than on all other forms of advertising combined. For examples, side bars ads on Facebook are quickly being usurped in value by 'promoted' posts. For a fee, companies even can make their status updates more gluey on news feeds so that more followers get a chance to see them, but this content still follows the same rules as the regular posts gabble, followers will block it out just like a banner or sidebar ad. So the question is how do you keep engaging with the social media that you use?

Based from an article I read, there are some suggestion for the social media marketer to reduce their time dedicated for social media marketing to 15 minutes a day while still maximizing its effectiveness.

1. Write your post in advance; Its natural if you go to Facebook (for example) to post something or update status but you end up hours by scanning and reading to your friends posts. It is normal and its what social media is for and how we stay connected and informed, but it also may suck hours from our workday, leaving us with an impression that social media marketing taking too much time. We could reduce this time by maximizing our time through write the posts in advance (on the memo or on your handheld). The actual posting time should be taking 5 minutes or less.

2. Dedicate response times; we often feel that comments that is left by social media follower should be responded immediately, but if we are in the middle of a project, constantly switching gears to handle social medias alerts can suck productivity level away fast. Marketers should dedicate times each day that they log in to respond to activity on the pages of medias. By choosing one or two times each day that you log in for 5-15 minutes to respond to the comments, you will reduce the constant checking-in that alert system tempt us to.

3. Creating chain of command; depending on the size of the company, varied people may have different jobs relating to the social media account. If you have a customer service team, they will be likely to be the ones to respond to the comments from the follower about the company either positive or negative comments.

4. Automated system; a program like HootSuite can offer automation and streamlining of social media accounts. By logging into a one master page, it is very possible to organize all of your account at one stop. Although the temptation may be to plug in a week's worth f content and let the computer to do the automated posting it can suck the social out of the process and earn your page a reputation for advertising content instead of engaging to in relevancy. So it got plus side and the minus side of it.

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Social Media Affecting Recruitment?

I believe we all have heard or experienced how social media affecting the recruitment process. Sometimes in Facebook or similar social media we don't want to put our 'embarassing' picture from a party or something similar, because these pictures might affect our recruitment later. Its not just a picture, but also in posting or tweeting something inappropriate. Based from a 2012 survey, it demonstrate that your social media profile could break or make your chances of being hired. 

A survey conducted by Eurocom Worldwide in 2012 found that almost one in five technologies industry executives not hiring some person because of the candidate's social media profile. I found this fact to be ridiculous, their social life won't be affecting their work capability, but it may affect the company reputation if one of their employees do something inappropriate. Aside from this, there are some recommendations based from Forbes article on how to build a positive social media profile and avoid being rejected by a potential employer.

1. Facebook: Follow the old saying about not posting anything in your profile that would make you embarrassed. Don't use Facebook as your canvas to vent everything you hate about life, your job, someone else, or a company. Some people recommend to create a separate personal profiles and professional profiles, so you can manage it, even though so, recruiter can simply look out for your name in Facebook anyway. Other way is to have 2 names, 1 for work 1 for personal life which is ridiculous. Best way is to keep it low profile posting and make some of your photos or album become private only where anyone else cant look at it. 

2. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is better for job seekers than Facebook because you can create a professional profile by using it as an electronic resume. This include writing a profile summary, current job info, past job experience, education, awards, skills, and even obtaining testimonial from previous managers or direct reports. If you author a blog that relates to your work, include it in the url information as a plus point. Then you can encourage the potential employers to review your info on LinkedIn.