On Internet Business

How not to use Twitter

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

Furniture retailer Habitat recently got itself into some hot water.

 Check out this:

 ”#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card.”

 Does it make any sense?

 This marketing trick was used by British furniture retailer Habitat on Twitter to increase its website traffic.

 Using popular topics as ads on Twitter is not an innovative strategy and has been in several marketing campaigns. Recently when Habitat incorporated terms like #Iran and #Mousavi in their tweets, it generated a backlash among Twitterers.

 The retailer apologised: “The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to.”

 However, damage has already been done and Twitter users are tweeting about the controversy in a very serious and negative mood. The issue has also fuelled a debate among the advertisers worldwide. According to Alex Burmaster, communications director at research firm Nielsen Online: “Advertising in social media can be like gate crashing a party. People who use social media are much less tolerant to have their conversations interrupted by advertisers.”

 On receiving such a bad response, Habitat removed the content from the site and initially blamed an outside source: “This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat – we were shocked when we discovered what happened.” According to them, this was against their communications strategy and they never sought to abuse Twitter.

 After sometime Habitat admitted that no outside agency was involved: “In response to speculation, we would like to clarify the hash tags were not uploaded by an agency.”  The intern who posted the tweets was fired and it was certainly unethical to exploit public emotions for marketing purposes.

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