How to win friends and influence people the Habitat way

It had to happen, but surprising to come from such a quarter. Habitat is a "designer" midrange UK furniture & furnishings store, and it has committed one of the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) social media marketing faux pas so far - it spammed the Iranian Election hashtags on Twitter.

You can see what has happened - some enthusiastic but inexperienced idio....sorry, "social media expert" has decided to monitor the trending topics on Twitter and then spam those topics with the Habitat marketing message.

There are two risks with this approach:;

- You spam people, which pisses them off and does not help the punted product. This may surprise social media marketeers, but most people don't like spam

- You get the context massively wrong - trending topics on Twitter can be extremely, um, varied and its not clear just how relevant trendy furniture and house tat is in many of them.

But to spam the Hashtags of those trying to get data about the Iranian protests out seems to be a Perfect Storm of stupidity.

You would have thought they may have put some form of "relevancy" filters in the spambot (for such I am sure it was), but oh no. Anyway, as SocialMediaToday (see the link above) reports, even though they later removed the messages (which will still stay cached in search engines for ages of course), they could then still have done things better:

So what could HabitatUK have done instead?

1. Individually @replied everyone who complained to them publicly, and apologised for the spammy behaviour
2. 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
3. Given Twitter followers a special offer discount voucher that could be redeemed via the web.
4. Asked Twitter followers what kind of information/offers HabitatUK could offer, that would give value and build interest.
5. 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.

So far silence, and certainly no discount vouchers

Don't know who Habitat's "Social Media Experts" were, but if I were Habitat I'd be sorely tempted to sue for damages on the grounds of total incompetence - though its interesting whether one could prove it or not (and sadly, people who do know what they are doing with Social Media get caught in the collateral damage). A public flogging* of the flackers may also assuage some of the people who feel this sort of spamming is outrageous. If the plan was to "go viral by being outrageous", it has probably misfired - big time! (Wilde's "only one thing worse than being talked about" nostrum has its limits....)

Sadly however, it is clear that this is the Future of Twitterspam, from now on. Like email, Twittermessaging will now be an arms race between those who want a useful messaging service and those who want to , ahem, "assertively" market their wares on it. I eagerly await my first Nigerian 419 Scam.....

But its not the Emptor who should Caveat in the use of AdSpam, its the Seller. Habitat has f*cked up big time, the spam is there in (semi)perpetuity and the damage to the Brand is going to take quite a lot to fix.

*of the social media-ted sort, of course