Case studies: Brands that fail - Habitat’s social media blunder and Twitter spam | Sector: Retail | Format: Social Media
The Habitat furniture store is among many brands to have misunderstood Twitter, blundering in to a private social space with typically offline approach. Their clumsy attempt to use Twitter’s # tags was an ill thought through way to get their messaging seen by larger numbers of people. The feed from HabitatUK effectively spammed thousands of people by trying to hijack key trending topics. Hash tags help people track conversations in Twitter, and the retailer decided in June to align itself to topics such as Apple’s iphone and the Iranian elections. It suggests three sequential failures in the marketing strategy: failing to read the landscape and the way people use the tools, failing to create a digitally native strategy and failing to have management checks and controls in place to identify poor practice. Coaching the marcomms team in digital marketing would have prevented this and a clear social media policy would ensure it never happens again.