UK retailer Habitat recently made a misstep by hijacking hashtags to get their message seen. The practice is popular among spammers who use trending topic keywords in unrelated tweets to get their message in front of more people. For example, a search on one of today's popular hashtags, HTC Hero - a new phone - revealed these get-rich-quick spammers:
But when grave topics with hashtags like #iranelection #neda and #iran are hijacked for make-millions-online pyramid schemes, the practice becomes immoral. And that's where Habitat landed a few days ago.
The BBC reported that @HabitatUK was posted "HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card" and other similar tweets using unrelated hash tags. The Twitter backlash was quick to comment on how HabitatUK were exploiting Iran to sell their brand and tarnishing their image. The BBC continued, "When asked whether an outside firm had been responsible for the strategy their spokesman declined to give details." So much for transparency.
Whether the person Tweeting was an internal employee or an outsourced agent, it's clear that they were inexperienced enough at representing a brand on Twitter that they were unaware of best practices. The push model of their Twitter account - advertising merchandise, following few, not conversational - is typical of traditional marketing practices and does not translate well to social media. It is particularly unforgiving when a brand makes a misstep in these waters.
Habitat claims that the errant communications were not approved and that they were not responsible for the hashtag hijacking tactic. In the end, if those who were overseeing the Twitter account at the management level were more involved in the social media tactics they chose to employ, they would have known and discussed what is an acceptable engagement strategy with the person doing the updates. That this incident happened at all - whether by an employee or outsourced - exposes Habitat of being yet another company jumping on the Twitter bandwagon without knowing what they are doing.
Habitat has since apologized, interestingly via the very blogger that broke the story. @HabitatUK has deleted it's offending tweets, but the Internet is forever and they will live on in the search cache. With mainstream media the BBC, Sky News, and the Guardian all running stories, and blogs picking up on the debacle, Habitat's bad judgment will live on. The challenge for them now is if they will overcome their ignorance and mishandling by participating more in the media that they choose to use. I hope for them that they become the poster child of best practices and not just one of the worst examples of how a brand uses Twitter.
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- HabitatUK apologises for Twitter hashtag issue (socialmediatoday.com)
- Habitat sorry for Iran Tweeting (news.bbc.co.uk)
- UK retailer spams Twitter, tries to hide the evidence, fails (thenextweb.com)
- Battling Spam in Iran Election Tweets (blogs.wsj.com)
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