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.