10 unbelievable Social Media Fails
How not to fall flat using social media!
In an ever increasing market, businesses need to stand out. Traditional marketing has still got a place, however, your potential customers and clients are buying products and services & interacting with brands in more complex ways.
The Social Media phenomenon over the last 5 year has fundamentally changed the way these potential clients buy your goods and services. Many businesses who have seen substantial growth since the recession in 2008 have continuously invested in new marketing methodologies of which social media has played a fundamental role.
Alternatively, there can be many repercussions to using Social Media as a means to communicating with your customers, below are my 10 unbelievable Social Media Fails.
1) Burger King and their “Whopper Sacrifice”:
In 2008, Burger King launched a contest in which users would remove 10 of their friends on Facebook, and for doing so, they would receive a coupon for a free whopper. However, it violated Facebook users’ expectation of privacy, and so, the campaign was shut down!
2) Pepsi’s “voodoo doll” post:
During the November of 2013, Pepsi’s Swedish branch launched an ad showing a ‘voodoo doll’ of football star Christiano Ronaldo getting its head crushed on train tracks. Fans in Portugal were not happy about this and an anti-Pepsi Facebook group was launched. In one day the group gained a following of 100K which was enough reason for Pepsi to pull the plug on the ad!
3) Build-A-Bear with a VERY insensitive post…
Build-A-Bear (along with CVS) was a target for twitter abuse after posting this 9/11 tweet. Alongside many other firms, this was clearly just a post for good publicity. However, good publicity is the complete opposite of what they received!
4) GAP being…GAP
Here’s GAP making a mildly insensitive tweet which offended East Coast victims during Hurricane Sandy! However, they later took it down and apologised.
5) Epicurious with an Epic fail
Cooking site Epicurious thought they could promote some recipes on Twitter following the events of the Boston Marathon bombing. How very wrong they were when they received all kinds of abuse after posting the following tweets!
Just one of many responses…
6) Dumb human + Computer = Bad social media!
Really? I am literally speechless…
7) This was NEVER a good idea *Facepalm*
Yes, it really is as bad as it looks. It was quickly pulled, but not after people took screenshots and it was widely circulated on social media.
Home Depot has since fired the person, and agency responsible for the outrageous tweet and offered this ‘copy & paste job’ apology to all who were offended, “We are deeply sorry for the dumb tweet and have deleted it”.
8) LG tweeting from iPhones…
In case you can’t read French…This translates to: “Our smartphones don’t bend, they are naturally curved ;).” The only problem with an otherwise (sort of) clever tweet was that it was sent via an iPhone!
9) That time HMV lost control…
And who could forget when HMV lost control of its social media team when rogue members used their account to tweet this!
10) When the Justice Department decides to weigh in on politics…
So the official excuse for this one was “A staffer in the public affairs office erroneously used the official Department of Justice Twitter handle to post a tweet that was intended for a personal account”. Hmmmm…
