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Archive for the ‘Social Media Fail’ Category

Social Media Fail – Promotional Tweets Using Real World Tragedy

Sunday, February 6, 2011 @ 06:02 PM
Phil Wride

It took me a while to weigh up whether adding this to the list of Social Media Fails was a good idea but I think I need to include it to try and stop more people falling into the trap. Whilst trying to make your promotional activity relevant to your audience is important it’s far more important to understand the potential impact if you are using recent real world events or something culturally significant.

This was a story I saw on Mashable talking about fashion designer Kenneth Cole and his insensitive tweet about the recent demonstrations and violence in Egypt. He used these real world events as a backdrop to promote his clothing line with the following tweet;

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC

When people read this there was an immediate backlash and he later wrote an apology having first removed the tweet. This just goes to show how something you think may be harmless (and may get you airtime) can actually work against you and potentially damage your brand. When creating your campaign or promotional activities and thoughts pop-up about linking it to something recent or widely recognised always consider the context and implications of doing so.

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Social Media Fail – Linking To Content That Doesn’t Exist

Monday, January 24, 2011 @ 04:01 PM
Phil Wride

Time for a change of pace and another post about something I class as a Social Media Fail, in this instance it’s a Facebook Fan Page. One of the things about Fan Pages is that the aim should be to engage users in an environment they feel comfortable and provide them with content that’s relevant and useful. This could be offers, exclusive insights, new video content or anything in between but if you are going to promote the content you need to make sure it’s actually there.


This is where the Social Media Fail comes in and I’m awarding it to the Amex (UK) page this time round for exactly that, linking to content that doesn’t yet exist. The main welcome page for the Fan Page greets you with a nice image and set of text about the tabs available and the information they continue. This is all well and good but if you click the Entertainment link it takes you to the tab and an image with a big “Under Construction” label across it. Why on earth would you do this? Or at least, if you are going to do it make sure your Welcome tab / image has a clear notifier on it that this section is “Under Construction”. As it stands there isn’t anything of the sort and it just looks amateur or like an incomplete Fan Page that I quickly lose interest in.

The take away from this post; make sure all the content for your tabs is complete and available before launching them and linking to them.

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Social Media – Don’t Expect Every Channel To Work

Monday, January 17, 2011 @ 09:01 AM
Phil Wride

I noticed a story on SocialTimes.com the other day and I think it perfectly highlights one of the important points to remember when creating and implementing your Social Media Strategy and is something I touched upon in a previous post. With a multitude of channels available and tools to manage them you need to consider which ones are going to be most beneficial and be prepared to spend more time on some channels to make them a success.

In this SocialTimes story about Kanye and Jay-Z, two of the biggest music artists on the planet, they opted for a specific channel to launch their new single and it turned out to be the wrong one. They tried playing the numbers game on Facebook and failed; 6 million+ fans “should” mean a good download rate, or at least that’s the way they saw it.

In reality the percentage of people that downloaded their new track was laughable and chances are they won’t look to use Facebook again for this sort of promotion. I have to ask though, are they that naive that they just assumed it would work? Clicking “like” once is easy for everyone to do, gaining regular interaction and a connection with those people is a lot harder and takes a lot longer. Time should have been spent trying to generate great rapport with the audience before launching the single in that channel rather than throwing it out and hoping it would take off.

The points to remember from this post; don’t assume every channel will automatically work and that some channels will require a lot more effort than others to get the most from them.

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Social Media Fails – Repeating Scheduled Tweets

Thursday, December 30, 2010 @ 12:12 PM
Phil Wride

With more and more people and businesses adopting Social Media as a tool to promote themselves I thought I’d start a collection of articles looking at “Social Media Fails”, or at least what I consider to be a Fail. For this first one I’m going to look at one of the things that annoys me and that’s repeating scheduled tweets on Twitter.

Now scheduled tweets can be a great thing if you want to coincide a tweet with some great new content going live or to promote a specific event / activity but when there is no other activity on your stream it definitely falls into the Fail category. Having the same repeated tweets with nothing else happening is a sure fire way to turn your followers off and make them click that dreaded “unfollow” button.

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Philip Wride – Social Media Marketer and Community Manager