Habitat is a trendy furniture store, set up by Terence Conran in the 1970s, for those who’ve never been to the UK its like a slightly more upmarket version of Ikea. @HabitatUK turned up on Twitter a couple of days ago, and decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, decorating, or shopping, but obviously the top hashtags for Thursday evening AEST such as #iPhone #mms #Apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contestant who got voted off #Poh. I found these on Twitter Search:
HabitatUK trending topic #hashtag spam
Just to really add insult to injury, HabitatUK even used an Iranian election hashtag, and threw one in for True Blood fans too, both trying to get people to signup to a database.
Hashtag abuse involving Iranian election
I’ve written about how easy it is to make a mess of hashtags on Twitter if you don’t know what you’re doing. Thanks to Twitter’s immediacy and public transparency, you can be quickly picked up on spammy behaviour – and the Twitter community made their disappointment clear to @HabitatUK.
Here are some of the more polite, yet dismayed responses:
@HabitatUKs response to all of this? They deleted their offending tweets, and replaced them a couple of hours ago with some generic product and sales oriented tweets with links to various web pages.
Thanks to the wonderful caching qualities of Twitter Search, the offensive tweets live on long enough to capture the evidence, but regardless of whether deleted or not, the damage to the brand has been done. The response tweets and the retweets will live on long after their offensive hashtag spam effort.
So what could HabitatUK have done instead?
- Individually @replied everyone who complained to them publicly, and apologised for the spammy behaviour
- Apologised in public. They could have sent out generic tweets to say sorry for not knowing what they were doing when they hijacked the trending hashtags for their marketing tweets
- Given Twitter followers a special offer discount voucher that could be redeemed via the web.
- Asked Twitter followers what kind of information/offers HabitatUK could offer, that would give value and build interest.
- Its ok to fail. Do it quickly and apologise publicly. People are a lot more forgiving when you admit to your mistakes rather than deny any wrongdoing.
The way the @HabitatUK page looks now, is typical of a traditional, push marketing, corporate PR approach. Admit nothing, aplogise for nothing, do not engage in conversation, advertise, advertsise, advertise. You have to wonder why they’re even bothering being on Twitter in the first place.
It's hard to believe Habitat could both get it so wrong and be so tacky. ” Lets jump in quickly grab some followers and pretend we are fast tracking twitter” Surely someone working at such a company would be using twitter personally and have straightened them out.
Obviously not.
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.
well said. i've saved a screenshot of their account prior to the deletings. grab it here if you want: https://schellerscreen.com/stuff/habitatuk_on_tw… 🙂
thanks for that 🙂
You have to hand it to Habitat, They make a “mistake” on twitter and people spam it over the web for them. If it was a mistake then they are getting some advertising out of people spreading it around, hell there is even the offers and links still showing. If it wasn’t a mistake but a new attempt at advertising using the power of people pointing and going “that’s wrong, look” it is doing really well.
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.
Was the work of an over enthusiastic HabitatUK staff member, or had they employed the services of one of the many self-declared social media gurus that seem to be multiplying at an exponential rate? I'd be curious to know.
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?
No-one knows – they have been very quiet about the whole incident. I'm sure it will come out eventually, will have to wait and see.
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.
Amazes me how easily this is to get right and how many people get it wrong. I suspect it's because of a lack of genuine buy in or understanding at senior level.
Compare your example above to the sterling job O2 [https://twitter.com/o2] is doing with the release of the new iPhone and many annoyed people at the new pricing.
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.
Thanks for your comment Ed. I am not really “complaining” in the post – just reporting on the dismayed reactions from the people who follow(ed) @HabitatUK when they saw the spammy Twitter behaviour. The only people who can ultimately judge them are their consumers, and it will probably blow over, eventually. The key is they realised their mistake – here's hoping they actually develop Twitter and social media properly.
The irony is that the brand IS interesting enough – they often do designer limited editions for charity, and short runs of things and the products are well produced. It's not enough to use Twitter as a driver to a database though, that's just lazy and defeats the purpose of two way dialogue, the central tenet of social media.
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.
Interesting idea. Fits in with the “any publicity is good publicity” idea. I think we'll get an idea of how sophisticated they are in a week or two, my guess is they are not that smart to understand the value/benefits of Twitter, otherwise they would have kept the offending tweets rather than deleted them.
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. Its amazing how quickly the digital landscape has moved away from the building database/direct marketing and push advertising approach. I loved the Habitat website from about 4 years ago – it was immersive and interactive and made the products look highly desirable. The web has progressed so much, social interaction has become so important that the mindless repetition of the same message just won't cut it in this social brand world
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.
Yes, good point: I don't know if this was done via IT dept or some such, but it was definitely done wrong :))) Some good points were made about the consultancy they received, and I can testify that companies often do not have the internal resources, so they turn to marketers. And if this is was indeed done with the help of IT dept, then surely it could be refined to only follow certain hashtags (i.e. #athome or #decorating – I didn't check if those hashtags exist, but that's just an example). So, with or without internal resorces and consultancy, what this shows to me now is a profound lack of forethought.
“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?
It will be with great embarrassment that I sit on my Habitat later on this evening!
What a mess the usually well respected brand have made of using Twitter. This is a brilliant and well researched post from Tiphereth and has spurred us write:
Sales & PR blunder: how Habitat UK lost its way on Twitter on our blog here in the UK.
Good info thanks for helping us newbies that don't know what were doing. @patshamblin
Hi!
I translated and posted your article and the response article on my advertising blog:
https://www.lesenfantsdelapub.com/spip.php?artic…
Really an interesting case study.
Thanks for sharing 😉
Thanks Alex, hope your readers learn from it
Thanks for this great case study. One of the best lessons I learned (not the hard way) is to start slowly, observe / listen before joining the conversation. Don't ever assume that you can “hijack” a pre-existing community. Further, when dealing with a new and unfamiliar medium, don't assume that prior practices will apply.
All really instructive. There are some add'l examples of companies who are participating with Twitter in a constructive and admirable fashion: https://smokejumping.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/wh…