Author: Anna

We all make mistakes, and understanding why is often the key to ensuring they don’t reproduce.

In an industry that relies on humans to create strategies, ideas and campaigns, clear communication is key and if the message is confused or not well thought out, disaster can strike.

With the online world as savage as it is, it is hard for brands to hide when they make marketing mistakes, even if they are harmless and unintended. Edge picked some of the most memorable mistakes that will hopefully help you avoid a similarly embarrassing situation.

We don’t have anything against any of the brands we have discussed here, and if anything they just prove that we are all human and all need to at times take a step back and review communication more carefully.

From the cringe-worthy to the technical mishaps, our favourite mini nightmares, looking at what went wrong, helps you work out what is right.

Terrible Twitter

Earlier this month Twitter ground to a halt when national crisp giant Walker’s Twitter campaign spectacularly backfired. The #WalkersWave campaign was a simple enough concept: give Twitter users the chance to win tickets for the Champions League Final in Cardiff. By tweeting a selfie to Walkers, an automated system would respond from @WalkersCrisps with a video featuring Gary holding up a photo of their face, inserted into the video.

Unfortunately,  trolls of Twitter enjoyed sending in selfies of serial killers and sex offenders, which due to the automation of the campaign meaning all entries got automatically published, it didn’t take Twitter long to spot the unexpected faces.

Lesson: Automation is easy and quick, but it does mean there’s no time to filter out any inappropriate received content. If the campaign was manual, these images would have been reviewed and spotted before they were thrown onto the official Walker’s Twitter page. It’s also clear to never assume the internet is mature because as this failure showed, there will always be trolls ready to take advantage, even if it is in bad taste.

Campaign Continuation 

Walker’s immediately took down the campaign and all content surrounding it shortly after it was clear it was not being received as expected. The same can’t be said for American Apparel, who have received numerous moments of backlash over the past few years for accusations of sexualising young girls and children in their advertisement of clothes. Although admitting their initial wrongdoing, the brand continued with campaigns that time after time received a negative response from the public. It’s pretty common sense for most marketers to stop something that isn’t working, but it seems American Apparel didn’t get the memo. Publishing more advertisements deemed exploitative, they even received numerous ASA bans and refusals of publication due to their images.

Lesson: The company were able to prove that their models were in fact over age, but there’s still a lesson to be learnt here that thinking carefully about how your campaigns will be received before making them viral, is probably a smart idea. We all see things differently, and evidently, a lot of people disagreed with the stance the brand took to advertise and the models they chose.

Insensitivity

Many strategists are well aware of the benefits of latching onto any current news or affairs that could give their brand a little boost. There are, however, clearly some events that shouldn’t be utilised for business advantage, and clothing giant Gap came under fire for this during storm Sandy. Assuming everyone was sheltering indoors, they released a well intended harmless comment that people can instead shop online, but of course, for those affected and facing devastation due to the hurricane, it was hardly a well thought out comment.

On a similar note, McDonald’s were also labelled as exploiting tragic events by adding messages to their billboards including ‘we remember 9/11’ and ‘we stand by Boston’ after the Boston Marathon bombings occurred. It may seem a good idea to show everyone you too are also anti-terrorism, but when you’re a global brand that is trying to sell stuff, people will be quick to assume you’re just trying to gain attention from unfortunate causes, which is what happened to McDonald’s.

Trying to Play The Hero

Starbuck’s digital and physical race together campaign launched in 2015 had good intentions, to encourage those to engage in discussing race issues with baristas. A harmless idea made to bring local communities together, the coffee giant actually ended up dropping the campaign after just six days when it became clear many saw the topic too broad and important to be stamped on coffee cups as a promotion for the brand. Of course, it’s so important to be able to express matters that mean a lot to your brand, and launching campaigns to raise awareness of them can often see great results.

Lesson: It seems on this occasion though that Starbucks was just a little too big for their boots thinking they could end race discrimination through scrawling the slogan on their cups and asking costumers to chat about the topic. Sensitive issues need to be addressed appropriately or not at all if they are to be included in a strategy, and it seems the coffee cup idea just wasn’t well thought out enough.

Careful Humour

We know that sometimes a clever joke can help engage an audience terrifically, but knowing the difference between when something is witty and offensive is very important. MTV Australia utilised 2016G ‘Golden Globes’ event to share their opinion on the night, one of which did not go down very well. Asking their followers where the subtitles were as they couldn’t understand two of the female winners, was met with backlash labelling the account racist and unacceptable. The brand did later respond which an apology.

Lesson: We all know that words typed out can sound very different to real speech, so thinking carefully about the tone of a comment will ensure you don’t end up accidentally offending anyone. What may seem a casual joke to some, can be grossly inappropriate for others. If you’re not sure how it’ll be received, it’s probably safest to not share it.

Live up To Your Campaign

Many of us will remember Amazon’s recent #PrimeDayFail. Spending weeks campaigning and promoting the event which they publicly said would gain more sales than Black Friday put together, customers were deeply disappointed when the day came around and online stock resembled a ‘garage sale.’ Having spent the time campaigning that users can expect great products with great discounts, they were setting their standards high and definitely didn’t manage to meet them. Numerous reports, although not verified, suggest Amazon’s revenue that night was drastically less than they expected.

Lesson: If you’re going to produce a ‘countdown’ style campaign that promotes and builds excitement for a certain day or event, it’s important to give an accurate expectation so users aren’t left confused when the real deal is far from what was promoted and promised. Amazon did prove however that successful run-up campaigning will lead to interest, as they did have thousands logging on to buy when they launched.

In conclusion, it’s clear most marketing mistakes are very much unintended, and marketing is often learning from our mistakes to generate something awesome that works. We all make mistakes, but as long as we are analysing mistakes carefully, we can at least bank of not making them again.

Many of us are competent with other Moz Tools, but a tool that is perhaps not as spoken about is Followerwonk. Changing how digital marketers can manage their social media accounts for clients, the tool has a number of useful integrations that when used smartly, can make a great deal of difference. It can seem a complex tool at first, but it is really very easy to use once you understand the different aspects of it. To help you wrap your collective heads around it, we have some of the top basic tricks that you can do with Followerwonk.

Find Your Audience

Attracting the correct followers to your account can often be the most time-consuming task for a social media manager. You may have a great idea of what your audience is, but aside from ensuring your tweets have the search visibility to be found by these individuals, it can be hard to unite your target audience with your channel. It can be frustrating seeing your following growing so slowly, but often this is simply because you are not reaching the right people.

Moz’s bio search means you can type in key terms that you know your target audience will likely be using, and it’ll bring up a list of profiles that use these terms, either in their Twitter profile bio, or just in their tweets in general. As well as finding your followers by key terms, you can search by location, and even job title.
For example, if I am trying to get small business owners to follow an account on Twitter, there’s a decent chance a lot of these people will list themselves as a ‘small business owner’ on their profile.

As you can see, once the tool gathers the information, you have a number of options to then filter the profiles you would like to see. Whether that is narrowing it down to those with a small or large following, the time their account has been active or their ‘social authority’ (estimating similar to how Domain Authority works, the status of that profile) there are a number of ways to find the right people with this tool.

Of course, you may not want to hit the follow button on every single profile brought up, but out of the selection, there are bound to be a few potential leads on there, that if carefully looked after, could be a conversion, whether that is through engagement or following them and hoping for a follow back.

Get Your Competitors Followers

Probably a personal favourite out of the lot, the ‘analyse users’ tool means you can track who your competitors are following, and who are following them. This has worked wonders for me in the past, as it’s pretty to safe bet that if these profiles are following your competitor which does the same sort of thing as you do, then they are going to naturally want to know about you also, so there is the potential for a large gaining of followers.

For example, if you’re a jewellery business looking to find jewellery lovers who may want to buy your products, the followers of industry giants such as Pandora are likely to be individuals who could be interested in you.

Obviously, this can also be done manually on Twitter itself, but rather than having to scroll through hundreds of profiles, the filters in the tool means you can access certain followers instantly, by location, keywords they use, gender, age and much more, so you aren’t just viewing all the followers of a competitor profile.

As well as analysing your competitor’s followers, you can also learn more about the competitor through the ‘analyse their tweets’ option, letting you see the most authoritative accounts that have mentioned them, and who they most commonly engage with.  Seeing their most important tweets can also help you strategize your social media content better, by seeing what works well for your competitors and what you could be doing to to engage with a similar audience.

De-Clutter

A popular topic at the moment is ‘ghost followers’ being accounts that lay dead and inactive, often for unknown purposes, alongside the ever problematic spam accounts. Instead of having to crawl through your following to see what seems dodgy, Followerwonk’s  ‘sort followers’ allows you to track through followers with filters, as well as being able to view only those who follow you back or who don’t.

If you’re noticing your account news feed becoming cluttered of irrelevant accounts, you can also track through who you are following, to see there’s anyone worth unfollowing. Being able to maintain followers and following easily, through selected categories is definitely a worthwhile reason to utilise Followerwonk, especially if you manage profiles with a very large following.

Track Progress

It’s all good and well doing social media effectively, but if you can’t see and understand the results to show your clients, there isn’t much point. Tracking progress of social media accounts can be difficult, as it’s harder to put figures and stats on than say, a website.

The track followers tool shows you easy-to-read graphs showing your growth (or decline) and followers you have lost and gained in a certain time period. It can be particularly interesting to see who you’ve lost, and it can raise vital questions as to why they’ve decided to go.

This progress can all be put into reports as downloadable formats, so it will take no time at all to print off a report for a client and save you manually having to put together a table of information. For more even more details, if you analyse yourself against another profile in the analyse section, you’ll also be able to see the demographics and information of your followers. This can be really useful to uncover further who you should be reaching out too. You may think you know your audience, but after analysing the demographics you may realise it’s actually pretty different.

Track Progress Vs Competitors

Although not always necessary, it may be useful to sometimes be able to show your clients that their channels are doing better than those similar. This isn’t just saying ‘hey, we have more followers’ but could lead to being able to say ‘we are getting you more sales than X’.

As shown in the example here, alongside being able to show you how much more or fewer followers you may have compared to a competitor, you can also see if you have any in common, giving you an important indication of the ‘common’ audience for your industry.

Source Influencers

Hunting for influencers and those who could maybe give you a retweet now and then to circulate your account, can be difficult. Manually finding influencers that don’t just have a large following but are also relevant and not already too popular to notice you, can take a long time.

In the same way, you can use the search bios to find your potential followers, switching up the filters and searching for those with the highest social authority and the following can find potential influencers that can help your social media accounts grow.

For example, if I am trying to find a relevant blogger for a client in the fashion industry, searching in the key term fashion blogger will allow me to see influencers with a large following in this sector. Not all of these profiles will be a suitable match for you, but it can definitely give you an indication of the kind of key terms you should perhaps be revising in your search for influencers who are relevant and appropriate.

Followerwonk we are sure will continue to help social media enthusiasts enhance their social media accounts for some time. For more support on your social media campaign needs, contact the team at Edge today.