How Vodafone's social media campaign turned into a media disaster.
The big brands have long recognised social media as a fantastic way of building quick and
personal relationships with their customers. Relationships that traditional media just cannot make.
For Vodafone this Christmas, one such PR stunt went horribly wrong!
In a clever pre-Christmas social media campaign to make Vodafone seem like a fun, generous and warm company – it was giving away free handsets to lucky Twitter users who used the hash tag #mademesmile to tell the company what things gave them a warm, fuzzy feeling . Launched on 11th December the company invited people to “use Twitter to share something that made you smile today”.
Sounds great. What could possibly go wrong?
By day 2 it was the most discussed Twitter Topic in the world. Hurray ... except that the hashtag had been ‘hijacked’ and was being used by thousands of Tweeters to express their displeasure at the company’s alleged tax avoidance. This was egged on by the anti-cuts group UK Uncut who encouraged it’s nearly 10,000 followers to comment.
What made this even worse was that Vodafone had direct, un-moderated feeds from Twitter onto their website, making even more people aware of this issue.
Now this is one of those ‘perfect storm’ moments that are impossible to predict but does very clearly demonstrate not only how powerful and immediate social media networks such as Twitter are, but also how difficult to control they can be.
It also clearly demonstrates how compartmentalising your business is becoming increasingly difficult. Having a marketing campaign with messages and promises that are not lived up to by the rest of the business, such as the products or customer experience for example, has always been an issue. It’s just that in the ‘old days’, no matter how disgruntled we were there was a limit to how far we could vent our displeasure. A whinge to friends and colleagues, a complaint to the company or a stiffly worded letter to the local press – all very limited. Now it is possible to tell the world in a matter of moments, or with a bit of organisation, to mobilise thousands within 154 characters ... now that is something to think about.
If you would like to discuss how you could use social media to promote your business, contact Alison on 01472 269 016.
Read full story in Guardian
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