How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study

Thanks for your comment Scott. Your observation is being made all over the world at the moment, and it will be interesting to see whether they evolve it past an RSS feed and push marketing approach. Or they'll abandon it as a failed experiment. You'd want to hope that a social media marketer in the UK helps sort them out.

thanks for that

Some one must have advised Habitat to use this methodology, some one who claims to understand the digital medium but clearly doesn’t. In my experience of working with these kinds of brands, they rarely have the internal resources to implement any thing like this an rely on supposed external resources and imbue a great deal of trust in these resources to advise them effectively, if this is the case I do hope the consultant has good liability insurance.

It was not to many years ago that Habitat where held up as a shining example of an ingenious web experience, so how they have managed to get this so wrong is beyond me.

This sounds like the Twitter account is either being managed by someone who doesn't have a flippin' clue about how to use Twitter for a brand, or is being managed by someone who is being *directed* by another idiot who doesn't have a flippin' clue about how to use Twitter for a brand. “Those hashtag thingies sure are popular – why don't you use those on our tweets?”

It is a bit of a shame for such a well-regarded and established UK brand; but they're getting some publicity from this fiasco, and I don't think it will hurt their sales in any significant way. You're right though, Tipereth – why bother in the first place if you haven't the slightest idea what you're doing? IMO, this little snafu is the least of their problems. Just being on Twitter and throwing in some random hashtags a social media strategy isn't. They need to establish some clear goals and think about Twittering from more of a content perspective. How are they offering value and engaging their followers? What will make their social media strategy successful and sustainable over the long term?

thanks for your comment Kari, yes, the whole thing smacks of having no strategic focus, and just jumping in with such a beloved brand has definitely caused a bit of a kerfuffle. Will be interesting to see if it develops further or whether they give up.

Although I agree that it's a tasteless use of the technology, I don't think it's quite on the kind of scale that you're complaining about here. It's inevitable that larger, and unsuitable brands, will try to engage in social networking. It's also inevitable that they'll get it wrong, and realise that they're simply not suited to it.

This is simply a short sighted effort to see what they could get away with, just as Keyword & Meta tag stuffing were in the early days of SEO.

Your comments are interesting about the @HabitatUK page. There are some companies that whose products and brand simply isn't interesting enough to fully embrace Web 2.0 – I don't know many people who would want to engage with Habitat as a brand. Companies like Coca-Cola have been trying this for years, and the best that they could manage was to team up with Menthos because dropping the sweets into bottles of Coke made them explode. They actually tried to sue them until they realised how popular the clips were.

If Coke, which is a huge brand, cannot engage consumers in a meaningful way, how can a furniture store hope to do this? The problem is that some brands, even Coke, just aren't that interesting. It's a drink. It's a coffee table. So what?

I agree with you about the voucher idea, and using twitter to test out ideas on consumers / ask what would interest them. But then we're back to the same old problem, which is, if the brand's not interesting enough in the first place, why would the consumers want to chat with them.

I see twitter as a PR tool, to which the same rules of PR should apply. Simply put, it this interesting? Is this something that the public would want to know, or is it something that the brand wants us to know.

What I also notice, apart from the insane use of hashtags, is that the marketing “message” never changes regardless of the hashtag. Not only is this a bad case of Twitter marketing, it is also a bad case of marketing on the whole: surely, there could be some variety in the “ad copy”??

Thanks for the case-study.

But surely by deleting the posts they look accidental, and there is nothing people like more than pointing and laughing.

Although I suppose it is equally possible that they are clueless and I am reading far more into it.

thanks for your comment, yes the messaging is very “push” and smacks of someone who's never been on Twitter, followed anyone or interacted on Twitter in anyway. I wonder whether it was the IT department who set it up as an RSS feed, and got it to just find the top trending topic hashtags to insert it into the tweet as an automated process? That would explain both phenomena (and the general social media ineptness) in one fell swoop.

“You have to wonder why they’re even bothering being on Twitter in the first place.”

Indeed you do!

Hijacking the Iran elections as it was a trending topic was a particularly low point in the Habitat UK twitter campaign.

Judging by their recent tweets they seem to be coming to grips with social media at last but has the damage already been done?

Good info thanks for helping us newbies that don't know what were doing. @patshamblin

Thanks Alex, hope your readers learn from it