On Internet Business

2009’s big social media #fails and how to learn from them

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Two examples from 2009, one from the very beginning of the year, the other from the very last days of the decade, reveal how even big businesses can get the social media world all wrong.

In spring, Skittles, the fruit sweet brand, failed to pull off the Twitter trick. Basically the Skittles homepage was reframed as a Twitter search feed for its own product. During the first few days, this innovation caused a huge buzz in the social media industry, with many people saying that Skittles was the first ‘Social Media Mozart’ but it hardly reached the social media users. Then it did. Over a couple of weeks the Skittles home-page was visited by hundreds, then thousands, of Twitter users, following the twitterfeed that showed Skittles related tweets. And while a few of those visitors were saying nice things about the brand, most were swearing, blaspheming, making racist, sexist or homophobic remarks all prefaced with the #skittles hash-tag. And, guess what? Every one of those potentially offensive tweets bounced right onto the Skittles homepage. It was troll-bait of the highest order and the trolls came in their masses. The brand failure was, for several months, glaringly and publicly evident.

Why did it happen?

Skittles hadn’t prepared their ground. Other companies, like Lush Cosmetics, are noted for their long history of engagement with their purchasers, so the Lush twitterfeed is a good mixture of brand led information and responses to that information, queries from the public being answered by the brand, and customer to customer interaction along the feed. Skittles had none of that and the tweet-savvy Twitter community knew it was being used as a brand enhancement device. Skittles made a cynical bid to hijack the Twitterati and got hijacked in return.

O2 have finished 2009 on a low note in social media, or rather, with notes being what has brought a twitter and forum backlash down on the company. O2 has been sending marketing texts to many customers who have repeatedly asked to be removed from its marketing activities. By Christmas, frustrated O2 customers were being contacted every day about free festive ringtones etc, despite having texted the opt-out number on numerous occasions. Finally the furious O2 customers, including the Father Ted writer, went twitter and developed their own hashtag to complain about the total lack of customer service from this media supplier. They also vented on the influential Moneysupermarket.com forum, and flooded geek forums with their concerns. What rubbed salt in the wounds of many O2 subscribers living or working in London was that during the second half of 2009 there were periods when they were unable to able to make or receive calls or transmit data because of pressure on the network from smart phones like the iPhone – but somehow, O2 managed to get its own spam through to them!

Why did it happen?

A conjunction of failures here: first the iPhone pressure caught out a lot of mobile phone companies, who found that smart phones were prioritised over the network and because they were using up vast bandwidth, ‘classic’ customers were unable to get connected. But for O2 it was much worse, because until November they had the exclusive contract for Apple phones, so their sales in that area were harming their customer base in the non-smart phone arena. Add to that the inability of their own marketing team to respond to requests to stop sending spam texts, and O2 ended up looking like they didn’t give a damn.

What to learn from this

1. You can’t move into new areas of business communication without expecting reciprocal relationships. Companies do best when they engage first with their established customer base using new media and then take that loyal group forward into new campaigns.
2. Just ‘using’ new media is impossible – the interactive nature of the technology means that any company that steps into social media is open to being held up to public ridicule, complaints and scorn, using the very technology they’ve tried to exploit themselves.
3. Social media engagement requires a consistent response from a brand, not just a dipping in and out – it’s not like print or TV advertising which offers the chance to step back and assess response. Going into social media means being ready to work on a day by day basis with customers, with no time to stop and think about your response. If you make people wait, they will believe you are either incompetent or have something to hide.

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