How to avoid a social media disaster

Social media has the power to transform your brand, giving you the chance to engage with a huge audience, but one slip up can leave you facing a bit of a backlash. We’ve picked out a few really bad examples, which will send shivers down the spines of all social media experts.

 

Using humour and personalised responsesPTF

Humour can be a great tool for brands to connect with their audience, but when it doesn’t stick things can go badly wrong.

We love Wendy’s sassy social media presene – in fact it’s part of the most retweeted tweet of all time (Did Carter ever get his nuggs?) But in January, Wendy’s decided to post a picture of Pepe the Frog dressed as the Wendy girl, not knowing the anti-semitic undertones the meme had undertaken.

The tweet was quickly deleted, apologies were made and Pepe the Frog died just a few months later. We’re not kidding…he really was laid to rest.

 

Audy-tho-0iences love to joke

Walkers scored an own goal earlier this year, teaming up with the UEFA Champions League and everyone’s favourite crisp salesman, Gary Lineker, to promote its “Walkers Wave” campaign. The idea was to post a picture online, before it was superimposed onto a placard being held by Lineker, but was hijacked by people uploading pictures of less than savoury (#foodjoke) characters.

The Walkers team were planning to show the live videos on huge screens in the centre of Cardiff, which would have been hilarious/disastrous *Delete as applicable*.

Banished to the corner and described as one of the worst ideas of all time, the campaign was never to be repeated… until The National Lottery rolled up just three months later with a very similar campaign, which led to very similar results…

NC

 

Star power

A little star power can do wonders for boosting any brand – that’s if the celebrity in question can actually follow instructions. Take Naomi Campbell, for example, who simply copied and pasted an email sent by her PR team upon sharing a picture of new Adidas trainers.
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