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Mediarun Search Marketing News

Habitat – How not to Tweet

June 23rd 2009

Author :: Angela Hughes

Twitter – the social, micro-blogging platform has been successfully used by brands and individuals alike for a number of months. But for those new to this medium of communication, there is a powerful lesson to be learnt from Habitat’s recent campaign. Habitat sells furniture and soft furnishings in the UK, online and offline. To promote their products and new ranges, they decided to join Twitter and piggyback on popular tweeting topics.

Twitter trends

Twitter displays trending topics – topics that are becoming popular and are receiving a high number of tweets. During the G20 protests, anyone searching #g20 could see all related tweets, from all users. From a communications perspective, this makes for truly global interactions, and can allow people to build their own version of news stories, in real-time, without having to rely on the traditional news broadcasters such as Sky, BBC and CNN. Often news stories break on Twitter before the broadcasters can get there – as was the case with the plane landing in the Hudson in New York.

Habitat

For their first steps into micro-blogging, Habitat decided to use the popularity of trending topics to send out links for products and price lists. On the surface, using popular trends to enhance marketing efforts may be a logical step, however a little more insight into the dynamics of social media, and tweeting in particular, would have highlighted the major problems with this approach. The first problem is having a scattergun communications approach; randomly targeting anyone with the same message is not effective marketing. Secondly, the trends that Habitat decided to follow were at best irrelevant, at worst in bad taste. For example, product lists were sent out in connection with the iPhone (#iphone), Apple (#apple) and the Iranian election (#mousav). Thirdly, this tactic is obviously spamming. Unsurprisingly, users picked up on this spamming tactic very quickly and openly tweeted their dismay.

Lessons Learnt

Social media is a two way communications process; Habitat should have been prepared for the community to react and respond to their actions, whether positive or negative. The community responded both negatively and with utter amazement – surprised that a leading brand would participate in shady and distasteful marketing techniques. Habitat’s response; delete all offending tweets and replace them with generic, product/sales orientated tweets. This rash response unfortunately will not stem the damage done to the brand as tweets will remain live on Twitter Search due to caching, and responses and re-tweets will ensure this slip-up is spread even further.

What should Habitat have done?

• Engage with people that had complained to them publicly - individually @replying

• Apologise publicly – admitting they did not know what they were doing when they piggybacked on trending hashtags for marketing tweets.

• Providing twitter followers with an incentive - such as a discount code/voucher

• Engage with twitter followers – get their feedback on what info or offers would add value or be of interest to them.

• Accept that with new technology or new marketing methods, it’s ok to fail. Companies can recover as long as they do it quickly and apologise publicly. People are a lot more forgiving when you admit to your mistakes rather than deny any wrong doing.

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon of a popular social networking site – such as Facebook or Twitter, but in order to do that you need to move away from the traditional, push marketing, corporate approach – engagement and conversation are crucial. Therefore, for any business approaching social media it is important to prepare to engage with your target audience, think about how and why you are using social media platforms and ensure your basic marketing strategy principles are utilised.

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