The Habitat furniture store is among many brands to have misunderstood Twitter, blundering in to a private social space with typically offline approach. This week’s clumsy attempt to use Twitter’s # tags was another ill thought through way to get their messaging seen by larger numbers of people. Given that somebody inside the firm made the decision, it’s staggering that this was never questioned. The feed from HabitatUK effectively spammed thousands of people by trying to hijack key trending topics. Hash tags help people track conversations in Twitter, and the retailer decided in June to align itself to topics such as Apple’s iphone and the Iranian elections – at best irrelevant to the brand, but more likely just damaging. How did it happen? Three sequential failures in the marketing strategy: failing to read the landscape and the way people use the tools, failing to create a digitally native strategy, and failing to have (any) management checks and controls in place to identify poor practice. Coaching the marcomms team in digital marketing would have prevented this, and a clear social media policy would ensure it never happens again – but undoing the brand damage, well that will cost a lot more than the whole Twitter feed did in the first place.
More details on the Neoco blog that broke the story | Social media best practice | Social media case studies
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