It seems professional marketers have forgotten the basics of their craft and opted to follow the lead of spammers everywhere, with news that Habitat has been ‘mistweeting’ of late.

The trendy furniture chain has been using online search words (known as hashtags) linked to the protests in Iran to lure large numbers of people into its Twitter feed.Habitat used misleading hashtags to promote its spring collection, which meant that people who wanted to find out about the violent mass protests in Tehran were presented with posts about discount sofas and the Habitat gift card.

 Other inappropriate hashtags the company used included ‘iPhone’ and ‘Apple’.

Along with the protest in Iran, these have been some of the most widely discussed topics on Twitter and it looks as if Habitat had hoped to piggyback on the strength of interest in these subjects.

After all, it’s unlikely that anybody is going to search or hashtag ‘Habitatspringcollection’ on Twitter but even so, this misguided use of social media is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst, particularly as the site has become an essential communications tool for the Iranian opposition movement.

Whatever happened to marketers targeting their audience? Surely it would have been far better for Habitat to hashtag phrases like ‘newhome’ ‘movinghouse’ and ‘interiordesign’.

Sending out tweets about furniture to people embroiled in a passionate political debate seems as absurd as sending a press release about the launch of a new alcopop to the editors of Horse and Hound, and frankly is no better than the thousands of Viagra emails we’re all spammed with on a daily basis.

Many companies, even those with in house or agency PR and marketing experts on hand, seem to be so desperate to exploit social media that they haven’t bothered to work out the best ways to use it, or to consider the preferences, or etiquette if you like, of existing users.

No self-respecting PR would expect a journalist to open his emails if he continually bombarded him with stories that weren’t relevant to the publication, and yet in the Twittersphere, they seem to think that persistent blanket messaging is the way to go.   

Yes, there is the potential to reach huge global audiences but exercising a little caution and restraint will ultimately help get your message further than mindless spamming.

 

Filed under: Online PR, Social Influence Marketing