28. Free Speech for All

olympic committee banned sponsorship
It’s great to be able to say what you want. It’s not so great when your opposition gets to say what it wants – in front of the same crowd. Twitter provided exactly the platform athletes were looking for at the 2012 Olympic Games. The Olympic committee banned sponsorship of any kind during the games. Athletes swarmed Twitter with respectful, but direct, tweets about the ban, drawing all sorts of support and opinions. The Olympic committee was perhaps not as pleased to be involved in this particular discussion.

29. Spam Spam Spam

toyota camry effect
Toyota has created a lesson for us all. They started a campaign during the Super Bowl to have users tweet messages about #camryeffect. The moment someone tweeted using the hash tag, they received a spammy automated message about a contest. Eventually, Twitter suspended the account for spam. Toyota might not be the image that comes to mind when hearing about a spammer, but even good companies can go bad with the right intentions.

30. Hash Tag Oversight

celeb boutique aurora
There are hash tags for just about everything, and it can be pretty confusing to try to figure out which one belongs to what. Celeb Boutique, an online clothing shop, tried to send out a promotional text earlier this year about #Aurora. Regrettably, that wasn’t the right one, and their clothing advertisement was posted to the account created for the tragic shooting in Colorado.

31. Negative Intentions

mountain-dew-diabeetus
Hiding behind a computer screen allows social media users to be as ugly as they’d like, and that negative attention and attitude can easily spill over into social media campaigns. A California company learned this when they posted a contest to name a new version of Mountain Dew ™ flavored with green apples. Rather than fun names, the leaderboard was soon dominated by joke submissions like “Diabeetus” and “Fapple.” The contest was called off right away.

32. Moving Too Quickly

As both Celeb Boutique and Netflix discovered, moving too quickly into social media may mean that you’re not adequately prepared. Jumping into an account before you’ve checked out the official hash tags and similar competitors can mean a confusing and perhaps fatal introduction into the fast-paced world of social media.

33. Digital Natives Take Control

While it’s great to be digitally savvy, it’s not always best for your business to allow the “digital native” or millennial to take control of your social media campaigns. This was glaringly obvious in the case of KitchenAid’s tweets about Obama’s grandmother’s death, but you can see it in virtually any case where a company had to retract a statement that a more experienced employee would never have made.

34. Harness Employee Contributions

It bears considering just how much your employees can contribute to a company’s social media platform. For Ketchum, a single vice president’s personal tweet was enough to tick off the company’s biggest client. In the case of J.K. Rowling’s new book, the leaker was found to be a lawyer who told his friend’s wife, who then tweeted a comment on another woman’s post. Who had to apologize? The man’s law firm.

35. Prepare to Play Along

woody-harrelson-reddit
Some social communities like Reddit have strict rules – albeit unwritten – about how things work. If you’re going to play, you have to follow the rules. Take, for example, Woody Harrelson. He participated in Reddit’s Ask Me Anything, which is a fun opportunity to have a candid discussion about just about anything. Instead, Harrelson treated it like a big movie plug and PR campaign. Reddit users were disgusted.

36. Plain Speak

chrysler-motorcity
There’s no room for fancy footwork or language with social media. This is supposed to be casual and fun; a chance for companies and patrons to interact. But don’t be too casual. When Chrysler made a tweet as part of its clever new marketing campaign, the tweet wasn’t as clever. It stated that “Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet nobody knows how to F—– drive.” The ad company was quickly fired.

37. Good Taste Is Hard to Find

belvedere-vodka-rape-ad
Sometimes it’s hard to walk the line between edgy and terrible. Belvedere Vodka can explain the difference…now. The ad campaign for the vodka was supposed to be easy. The slogan was “Unlike some people, Belvedere goes down easy.” Unfortunately the ad included a picture of a smiling man restraining an unwilling woman. Rape is not edgy. It’s just lewd.

38. Social Media Is Hard to Fool

Walmart tried to pull one over on social media users and wound up looking foolish. The company’s PR campaign secretly funded a couple who traveled across the U.S. in an R.V. The couple spent the nights in Walmart parking lots and interviewed employees to discover their secrets and feelings for their employer. Surprisingly, all of the employees loved Walmart! It didn’t take long for social media patrons to recognize a fraud and Walmart’s PR firm was forced to issue an apology.

39. Know the Market, or the Market Will Know You

waitrose
Waitrose, a posh supermarket, went online and asked Twitter users why they enjoyed shopping at the supermarket. The responses were enough to make most company owners cringe. Waitrose shoppers said they enjoy “not being surrounded by poor people.” Luckily, Waitrose didn’t mind the brutal honesty, but this campaign could have gone very badly indeed.

40. Ignore the Possibilities

mitt app
Barack Obama had social media down to a science in 2008. He used his advantages again in 2012. His opponent, Mitt Romney, tried to make his own foray into social media, with pretty dismal results. His team launched a “With Mitt” app which allowed users to post pictures with campaign slogans. Things went downhill quickly.

41. Check Spelling

with mitt app
Mitt Romney’s “With Mitt” campaign gets another black star in social media for making a classic mistake. In the original, America was spelled “Amercia.” For someone running for president of the United States, spelling the name of the country correctly would seem like a pretty solid start. Unhappily, this was just the first of many social media stumbles for the presidential candidate.

42. Moving with SuperSonic Speed

ashton kutcher popchips twitter
The moment a commercial, tweet, video, or post goes live, users are able to make comments and post complaints. Often, users complain much faster than companies tend to respond, which only compounds the problem. In the case of an ill-fated Popchips commercial, Ashton Kutcher donned brown-face to play a stereotypical Indian man. The Popchips Twitter page and other social media accounts exploded with complaints, and people kept complaining while the company dragged its feet to address the issue.

43. Lacking a Social Media Plan

barack obama buzzwords
Barack Obama had an excellent social media plan. He researched keywords and messages. He found the buzzwords that resonated with his audience and used them to his advantage. He came from almost nowhere politically and beat Hillary Clinton to create a truly defining presidency. Hillary Clinton didn’t have a social media plan. She didn’t win.

44. Contradictory Platforms

Chrysler made beautiful commercials. They created videos and made a true image for the recovery of Detroit. This beauty was wiped out in a quick moment, however, when a bit of profanity laced a tweet that insulted the very iconic city that they had single-handedly built up through other platforms. The lesson here? Be sure your social media messages are consistent.

45. Anticipate Conversations

Social media is not traditional advertising. It’s not a chance to push your message on others as Toyota discovered with its spammy tweets. Instead, to utilize social media correctly, you must interact authentically with users and at least pretend to enjoy their company.

46. The Lack of Content

Sometimes it seems like there are a lot of ways to say something, but you start to run short on things to say. Before you delve too deeply into a social media campaign, be sure you have plenty to say. Otherwise you’re going to wind up shooting from the hip and sounding as idiotic as Kenneth Cole’s Cairo tweet.

47. Fear of Starting

You don’t know this next company because they never got started with social media. They never made a post, hosted a contest, or tweeted a tweet. The fact that you have no idea who they are in our modern global society should be enough of a message for you. If you are too afraid of social media to even give it a try, you’re going to be left behind.

48. Too Many Choices

With so many options out there, it can be hard to find the right platform to use. If McDonald’s had posted their McDStories on Facebook rather than Twitter, they could have controlled the material that was posted. As it stands, you can’t control what people tweet. You can at least monitor posts on Facebook. It’s important to pick the right platform for the job.

49. Political Innuendos

oreo cookies
The two things to avoid bringing into business (generally) are politics and religion. Nabisco recently realized just how hot these topics can be when they featured different sorts of Oreo cookies to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the cookie. The first featured design was an Oreo with stacked rainbow filling. The gay marriage advocates and the anti-gay marriage advocates all went nuts. They didn’t get as frantic about the Elvis versions of the cookie, and there’s a lesson there.

50. Customers Will Talk

forrester
Forrester has done polls on this, and it’s true – customers trust themselves more than they trust you. That means that customers will talk about your products via social media whether you’re a part of the discussion or not. Even if you don’t have a social media platform as part of your brand and PR campaign, you need to be online working with customers and monitoring the feedback at the very least. Otherwise, your clients may be sabotaging all of your hard work with hard work of their own.
Can social media make your business? Absolutely! The current president of the United States is a perfect example of how quickly you can rise in popularity using social media effectively. But just as social media accounts can make a career, they can break one as well. It’s a slippery slope that every small business owner simply must be prepared to navigate carefully.