Let’s Learn: Top 5 Social Media Campaigns That Failed Miserably

For the past year or two, social media has been tentatively explored as the best marketing tool around. Digital marketing agencies are jumping in with both feet on the Social Media bandwagon. Not only this, many of them are even thinking of themselves as Social Media Gurus. But hey!  Is it even possible to label yourself the master of social media when the concept itself is just few years old? I don’t think so! For this very reason, more than half of these attempts are likely to fail miserably.

Here, I have listed the top 5 social media campaigns that were poorly executed followed by the steps that can be taken to avoid such failures – enjoy reading!

1.     WalMart’s Facebook Disaster:

Rivals’ successful presence on Facebook was not digestible to WalMart and so they thought of running their own social media campaign on the very same medium.  Initially, WalMart managed to attain a large number of fans but sadly they couldn’t make any use of it.

Fearing the negative comments/feedback from the members, WalMart restricted the ‘comments’ option from their Wall Posts. This immediately did away with the whole point of creating a Facebook brand page. The lack of interactivity and self-promotion provoked the members as well as the community of bloggers, and soon enough, WalMart was considered little more than a Facebook joke.

2.     Ad-vani’s Political Campaign:

Indian politician Lalchand Kishan Advani, tried to position himself in lines of Obama as a ‘change agent’.  He spent an average of Rs. 250 crores for his genuinely pathetic ad campaigns. He literally targeted all the Indian sites with his aggressive Adwords. Perhaps, while promoting himself insanely he forgot that ‘Advani is not a new product on the market’ which needs crazy branding!

Instead of connecting to the people online in a non-intrusive manner or mobilizing the bloggers to write about him, he preferred spamming the sites of the whole wide India.  His blog also didn’t seem to appeal to the audience much and he failed both in the elections, and on social media.

One of the famous Indian blogger writes about Advani’s campaign as follows:

“We saw Advani becoming Ad -Vani with his aggressive adwords campaign targeting every indian site. At one point there were only his ads on every site we browsed.  The first and foremost reason it failed – We hate Ads.”

3.     When Skittles Met Twitter:

Back in 2009, Skittles volunteered its website and brand for one of the first viral experiments in social media user behavior.  They decided to turn their homepage into a live tweet stream which automatically displayed literally every tweet mentioning “Skittles.” Not that it was a totally new social media strategy; this had already been adapted by Modernista on a smaller level.  Let’s just say, this time it didn’t go well. Wall Street Journal badly backfired this experiment.

Soon enough the campaigns’ launch, people began to fill the live feed with abusive comments, cursing skittles. Not only this, many social media activists even posted obscene content which defamed the brand’s image badly.

4.      Kiva.org’s Hash Tag gone wrong:

Kiva.org’s Twitter campaign is another social media strategy that lacked a strong theme. Kiva.org wanted to increase their number of followers on Twitter and so they called out supporters to recommend their brand using the hash tag FollowFriday.

Unfortunately, Kiva’s message was lost somewhere in the large amount of Twitter chatter surrounding this hash tag, and they received only a small number of (targeted) followers. They chose the wrong audience using the wrong social media strategy.

5.     BigPopcorn – Spamming for Digg:

The owner of bringPopcorn made a very shameful strategy to get on Digg.com’s first page. The team started spamming the top diggers community by bribing them.

In addition to this, the website’s owner also got banned from Netscape.com for having more than 20 fake accounts being made to promote his website. They were exposed soon and made it here to one of the worst social media marketing strategies ever.

With that said, there are always ways to clean up the mess you make.  You can always learn from your past mistakes and avoid them in future.  Some of the important points you need to keep in mind while running a social media campaign are listed below:

Revise your marketing message as many times as you can. It is your primary job to ensure that sure you are getting the least amount of attacks or negative feedback from your audience.

While you are using Facebook for your social media campaign, NEVER restrict comments and feedback to your Facebook page as Wall Posts, instead; the better option is to creating a discussion board for more effective and dynamic two-way communication.

Be ethical: Lying or purposely deceiving will not pay off as some might suspect! Being authentic & sticking to your overall image is very important.

Learn to be happy in less; the ‘more the merrier’ concept does not always work; sometimes less is more!

If you mess up by mistake, always have a Back-up plan. Luck is overrated and you need to be prepared in case anything goes wrong.

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