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In the last case study, we discussed the importance of brand marketers ensuring strong strategic foundations for social media, as this directly affects how the brand can be perceived. In Dell’s case, its structured approach was a success, as the company earned millions in revenue from Twitter and sparked a lot of discussion among consumers through its blogs. In this article, we’ll show a different side of the story and explore an example of a bad social media strategy and how it affected the brand.
While Australians may not be familiar with Habitat, it is in fact a leading UK furniture retailer, with more than 80 stores across Europe. When the company decided to jump on the social media train by starting a Twitter page, it seemed at first glance that they started in the right direction, with a nice Twitter page that reflected the clean brand of the company. However, it was the lack of strategy and content that had Habitat in trouble.
To drive traffic to its Twitter outpost, Habitat used various hashtags in its tweets to appear on popular discussion topics. For non-Twitter users, #hashtags are the keywords used on Twitter to help people filter and search for tweets. For example, tweets about the 2010 World Cup had the hashtag ‘#WorldCup’, which means that every time people searched for this topic, tweets with this hashtag would appear. Therefore, they are used to make relevant tweets appear in relevant searches. However, the problem with the use of hashtags by Habitat was that they were irrelevant to the content of the tweets, they used those that had nothing to do with furniture, purchases or renovations. Instead, they made the mistake of simply putting popular hashtags at the time of publication. They used hashtags like #iPhone, #Apple and even the Australian Masterchef contestant who got rejected, #Poh. Clearly, Habitat saw an opportunity to generate greater brand awareness, as by using these hashtags, they would appear in popular searches. The upshot for end users was that when they searched for, say, #iPhone, Habitat’s tweet would pop up, only to find that it had nothing to do with their search. Obviously, Twitter users viewed this negatively and harshly criticized the luxury furniture company for taking advantage of popular topics to send spam.
To make matters worse, in response to the backlash, Habitat removed its spam tweets. Unfortunately for the company, they are still visible through Twitter search. Many bloggers have commented on the lack of transparency on behalf of the company, and many have criticized that Habitat should have publicly apologized for sending Twitter spam and compensating those who received it.
Clearly, Habitat didn’t have a real Twitter strategy to begin with. They opted for mere pull-marketing to drive traffic to their website. But the main lesson here was that they did not strategize on how to add value or generate conversations about their brand, products, or home décor topics. Instead, they created spam by taking advantage of popular topics. Despite Habitat finally apologizing for its spam, the damage to its brand has already been done. Since then, Habitat has learned from its lesson. Rather than simply advertising their products, they have generated conversation, responding to customer needs and inquiries, and most impressively provided decorating advice for individual users.