DASI

Twitter screen shot showing Habitat anger.

Part of my job is to know what’s going on in the giant melting pot that is the digital market place. The beauty of the medium is that news travels fast and if you take the time to look you’ll always find things to talk about, and generally people will listen. Of course the flip side is that if you get something wrong, you’re in for a proverbial shoeing of which this is a classic case in point.

If you didn’t see it last week, Habitat have been roundly slated for spamming people on Twitter by using the fash tags (#) to gatecrash the most popular trending topics. At its very worst this meant that offers for its furniture popped up amongst the discussions around the Iranian election. Unsurprisingly, this caused quite a stir, and is the kind of brand damage that will take more than a 10% voucher to undo.

Habitat sent an official apology to one of the blogs that first picked it up, which read:

“I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message.

We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hash tags 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.”

Clearly something went seriously wrong somewhere along the chain of command here, and some very valuable lessons have been learnt. There wasn’t anything malicious in what they did, but it was naïve in the
extreme and as a result the very community they were trying to reach has absolutely voiced their negative opinion.

No brand should ever take social media for granted or make short cuts and expect anything more than at best short shrift. Thankfully these types of horror stories are few and far between, and there is nothing to fear in using social media for your brand, providing you do so with respect for the people that use it. There are some fantastically knowledgeable people out there now who can show you the ropes, but it will take some time: just because it’s free does not mean it’s easy.