Social media is a powerful marketing communications tool, but that doesn’t mean it should be explored without a sound strategy for brands. Unfortunately, some brands don’t always receive that advice and try their hand at every social platform possible, neglect to do their research or even assume nothing bad will happen. As a result, some of these brands have experienced epic fails – from using an inappropriate trending hashtag or launching an ill-fated Twitter chat with the wrong audience, to customer service gone terribly wrong.
Here, we explore some of the most common missteps made by brands, highlight some of the worst offenders and impart our social media smarts to help brands avoid these same mistakes in the future.
When Customer Service Backfires on Social
For brands that provide a service or product, social media is often a tool used for customer service. Content, of course, is always an important part of any social media strategy, but people typically connect with brands on those platforms because they want their experiences with them, good or bad, to be heard. So it’s no surprise that when a complaint goes unanswered or the exact same response is sent to everyone who tweets at the brand, users get angry and comments go viral. Take this British Airways Twitter conversation for example:
When British Airways took more than a day to respond to an upset customer because, as they posted, they only operate on Twitter from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., a consumer paid to promote his tweet. He was so distraught about his father’s lost luggage and the lack of responsiveness from the brand that he paid! To top it off, they then asked him to put in more effort by direct messaging them to provide additional details. Really?This entire ordeal is the perfect example of what not to do. Brands need to be available outside of traditional business hours (especially when these no longer exist), show compassion for its customers, and most importantly, offer a personalized touch with each response.
Oh boy! In this instance above, it’s pretty obvious that Bank of America used a robo-response to @OccupyLA. The problem with this is that people can see this from a mile away. In fact, if you read the full tweet chain here, you’ll see just how obvious it is. Similar to the British Airways example, brands need to showcase that they are human and genuinely care about the people reaching out to them. When consumers, especially millennials, start to see the same response to every tweet, they feel cheated and like a number, and become less loyal to the brand.
So what can brands do to avoid this pitfall?Identify the goals of social media efforts and establish a community management process in order to ensure people are responded to in a timely and positive manner. It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to be happy with a brand. Social media is bound to give way to negative complaints from someone who wants to express the recent bad experience they just encountered.
Rather than avoid comments like this altogether or allow a robot to respond, brands can take these challenges as opportunities to showcase how responsive and committed they are to providing a positive experience for all.
When to Rethink the Twitter Chat
Q&A sessions between companies, celebrities, TV shows and their respective audiences have become more and more popular in recent years. Twitter Q&A sessions usually garner high engagement because they are easy for audiences to participate in and for brands to host. However, sometimes Twitter isn’t the best outlet for this type of engagement.
Case in point, JPMorgan Chase’s #AskJPM fail.
The banking giant assumed a Q&A session on Twitter with its Vice Chairman, Jimmy Lee, would be a great fit for its audience. But the chat was over before it started. The hashtag, #AskJPM, quickly spiraled out of control and into a tool for customers to use to vent their frustrations and criticize the brand.
The fiasco even resulted in a dramatic reading of all the Tweets by the voice of “American Greed,” the CNBC show that ironically enough depicts true stories of how far people will go to get rich.So, what went wrong? To start, Chase was already in hot water for its involvement in the ongoing investigation into manipulation of the foreign exchange markets. Making matters worse, the company seemed to have a complete disregard for the sensitive subjects (e.g., mortgages, loans, etc.) that were likely to come up during this session. How did they not see the disgruntled comments coming from a mile away?Ultimately, a Q&A on social media likely wasn’t a good choice for them in general. And, Twitter, most certainly, was not the best platform for fielding complex financial questions given the 140-character restrictions.
Rather than jumping on the “everyone is doing a Twitter Q&A, we should too” train, the brand would’ve been better served to determine the overall objective of engaging with its audience, and then choose a communication channel more appropriate for the topic of discussion.
When Your Hashtag Trends Alongside #EpicFail
Oh, thy hashtag. You know you’ve used one a time or two. The hashtag got its start back in 2007 when a man by the name of Chris Messina tweeted #barcamp as a way of grouping online discussions about a specific topic he sought to monitor. From there, hashtags were put in place to group together discussions and content on Twitter to make it easier for people to search for a topic and follow different conversations.
As with many things in life that start with a genuinely useful purpose, hashtags became trendy.Take Susan Boyle. Yes, the female singer who rose to fame after appearing on the British talent show, “Britain’s Got Talent.” When Boyle’s marketing team was preparing to launch her new album, they opted to create a hashtag, #susanalbumparty, to increase and capture engagement. See below, as they certainly accomplished that!
What the team also accomplished was a spot on a number of infamous lists: “Top 5 Twitter Disasters,” The Guardian, and “Hashtag Disasters of Our Time,” Forbes.com, to name a few. #susanalbumparty generated an abundance of chatter, online and offline, and subsequently lead to renaming of the hashtag, after much fodder and ridicule.
Feel free to find more of these gems online. And, if you are looking to create a hashtag in the near future, read this infographic, do your research and read articles like this one.
The key takeaway from these fails? Know your audience and your limitations as a brand. It’s not necessary to be everything to everyone or to be on every social media platform. Be strategic. Understand the opportunities for a social campaign to backfire and have a plan in place to address them. Best practices are to always review and research hashtags and trending topics, and read your consumers comments in full before responding or triggering auto-respond. Apply this to your brand strategy and you likely won’t find yourself on a “Top Ten Twitter Fails of All Time” list.
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