With today’s generation becoming more and more tech savvy, household and novel brands alike are finding themselves on social media platforms in an attempt to garner additional attention and consumption. Some of these brands have been total hits, gleaning thousands of retweets and social media interactions, where other brands have tarnished their images faster than a tweet from Justin Bieber is favorited by a thousand 13-year olds.
These two articles comparatively demonstrate how some brands can tweet away while others should stick to favoriting fan posts. Below are some of the highlights from this year’s brand tweets.
This real-time marketing stunt by Arby’s garnered an astounding 80,000+ retweets and tons of social media attention. During the 2014 Grammy’s Pharrell decided to don an Arby’s-esque hat, thus creating organic media coverage for both Pharrell and Arby’s.
Here you can see Hamburger Helper is just as flawless in the mornings as Queen B (Beyonce). By taking a popular lyric from a hit song, Hamburger Helper as a corporation has become more relevant and has developed a funny, sassy personality that will appeal to the social media savvy.
Here we see some super sass from DiGiorno pizza.. #digiorno #didn’t! This is a prime example of corporations using real time events to make them interesting to their company and shareholders. This, in turn, creates a lively brand personality and a fantastic word of mouth advertising.
The world of corporate communications does not always fall happily under the umbrella of social media. Take, for example, some of the most horrible twitter fails of this year.
Kenneth Cole most certainly did not get the ‘reaction’ they were hoping for with this tweet. Often times, corporations are able to make fun of real-time situations and capitalize on them in positive ways. Linking civil unrest and uproar in Cairo with the launch of a spring collection is perhaps not the best way to get good business. As a result of this tweet, people spent the rest of the day tweeting negatively about the brand.
This, for McDonalds was quite frankly a McDisaster. Originally launching a campaign #McDStories with the hopes of creating real-time, cost-effective and positive exposure for the restaurant chain quickly turned into a tirade against McDonalds. The coup d’é·tat of twitter followers quickly hijacked the story, which quickly segued into a trending twitter rant topic. After launching the hashtag, it quickly spiraled out of control and became a major P.R. disaster for McDonalds.
You may be wondering why twitter is important for corporate communications. Truth is, it is one of the most valuable yet most risky assets a company may have. When creating a name and brand for its share and stakeholders, corporations need to establish a brand identity and unique voice. Corporations with a more youthful sense of humor and brand identity tend to appeal more to younger audiences; while corporations that represent wholesome family values may be better off creating pinterest accounts of recipes. Twitter is a fantastic, free way to garner additional attention for any brand. How can corporations prevent social media massacre? What strategies could they have in place to get organic media attention and fanfare?
The only question remains: to tweet? Or not to tweet.
http://www.businessinsider.com/13-epic-twitter-fails-by-big-brands-2012-2?op=1
http://time.com/5151/sassiest-brands-on-twitter-ranked/
lucMODE 