Habitat, a UK-based home furnishings company, received a lesson this week on how NOT to market its brand. Turns out whoever is minding their Twitter account decided to take advantage of all the buzz surrounding Iran and use related hashtags such as #MOUSAVI to peddle their wares.
Shameless? Yep. Brainless? Yep, again. And it’s not just isolated to piggybacking on #Iran – apparently, Habitat has been riding other trending tags such as #apple and #phone. I’m still a bit mystified by who actually thought this was a good idea. The company has deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology, but the damage is done.
A quote from the BBC News article:
“The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that has been caused.”
The BBC writer is quick to pick up on what is easily inferred from this statement: that a third-party agency is responsible for Habitat’s online marketing strategy and – perhaps more interesting – their Twitter writing. Letting someone outside your organization write your tweets and post to social media shows is a quick way to get into some seriously hot water. If your organization is thinking of using Twitter and other social media tools to engage with customers, for heaven’s sake, don’t let someone else do it for you. This is a DIY initiative.
512.529.1510
You make a really good point about Twitter being a DIY initiative. I wonder just how many organizations, companies, etc. are being represented by ghost tweeting on their behalf. It seems to me, the best solution would be to dedicate a person(s) in-house that could strategically share information via Twitter. IMO, there are too many opportunities to publicly fail because of the real-time aspect of the tool. Interesting example of what NOT to do. Thanks for sharing your take.
Richie, I think what we're seeing here is a company cramming an old, tired strategy into a new platform. Once upon a time, an enterprise could farm out its marketing strategy and delivery to a third party and everything would be fine. Doing this in the social media world doesn't work anymore. It actually requires a company to own not only their message but the transmission of that message. Habitat is learning this lesson that hard way.