The recent Habitat debacle, in which the company’s Twitter feed, HabitatUK, featured inappropriate Hashtags (keywords) to promote 20% discounts and the chance to win £1000, has left many members of the online community up in arms. Hashtags included #Apple' and '#iPhone' and even made mention of the Iranian elections '#Mousavi'.
Although the brand removed all the messages the following day and replaced them with standard marketing tweets, many members of Twitter had already seen the messages. While for some it was seen as an amusing incident, with Habitat continuing to feature as the butt of many an online joke, other members have spoken publicly of their annoyance. Online bloggers claimed that Habitat's spamming of the online site had damaged their reputation and would give them cause to question shopping there in the future.
Twittergate has fast become one of the most prominent examples of a brand's social media strategy receiving a backlash, and despite not technically breaking any rules, Habitat undoubtedly broke the Twitter users unofficial code on advertising.
In a recent statement on advertising, Twitter said, "The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue. However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We're going to leave the door open for exploration in this area".
The outcry has led Habitat to apologise to the online community. In a statement they said:
"The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.
It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community."
Speaking about the recent saga, James Fitzgerald, Director and Co-Founder of Social Media Library, told MMY Online:
"This will have given Habitat quite a wake-up call, demonstrating the power of social media when things are not done correctly, although interestingly it should also give them some kind of insight into the potential benefits should they do it right. A considered, well-executed social media outreach campaign can bring profound benefits for a brand.
There have been a number of examples where brands have been burnt by either misuse or neglect of social media. However a number of these have then gone on to use it to great effect, most notably Dell, who went from getting battered by Jeff Jarvis and ‘Dell Hell’ a few years ago to now using Twitter to engage its audience and to drive sales. Hopefully Habitat will benefit from this painful learning curve to go on and excel in social media."
http://www.socialmedialibrary.co.uk
http://www.twitter.com/
http://www.habitat.co.uk
For more information on how Social Media can be effectively deployed in to your marketing strategy please see Graham Lee, Chief Executive of The Social Media Library's, article which will be featured in August.