As an online blogger, I often dream about what it must feel like to have a viral hit. My content gets shared by regular visitors, sure, but I’m talking about the social media attention that puts your name on the map. The holy grail of online content if you will. I’m also not alone in wondering about this feeling. One reason that articles related to viral content and social media tend to be popular is because many people are searching for either a glimpse into or a search of the elusive viral hit. If you ask anybody involved in the following list of viral hits, they’d probably tell you that viral success sucks. Why? Well, you don’t have to look far to see examples of how social media is a double edged sword. The same strategies and tactics we use to get positive social attention can backfire in some very poetic ways. When this happens, you might still have the same level attention, it just won’t be the kind of attention you’re looking for. As a public service announcement to anyone who dreams of viral bliss, I present to you five social media mistakes that led to some spectacular viral fails. Enjoy them. Learn from them. Please, don’t repeat them.
Mistake 1: Forgetting which social media account you’re logged onto.
In the dawn of social media, many sites were fairly restrictive on who could have an account. These days, everyone and their tortured cat can have a wide array of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram havens. More commonly, people juggle between several different accounts. You might have a separate Twitter account for yourself, your business, your blog, and your toaster. It’s only human to get accounts mixed up every now and then, but when it happen, the results are like mistaking birth control pills for breath mints: the immediate gratification still rocks, but the long term consequences are unexpected and expensive.
This understandable mishap occurred on automaker Chrysler back in 2011 when an inattentive employee (who probably shouldn’t have been given the keys to the company’s official twitter account) sent out an F-bomb tipped warhead of a tweet that was meant for a personal twitter account. Instead, the employee let the company’s then 7000+ twitter followers in on the great mystery of poor drivers in the Motor City. Chrysler later deleted the tweet, apologized for the mistake, and presumably took the keys away from the employee.
Take Home Lesson: like finding the emergency exits on an airplane, please locate your login status before embarking on your social media adventure.
Mistake 2: Failing to get to know your audience
Whether you like it or not, your content needs an audience to go viral. To really get people to share your content, it helps to know something about your audience. In marketing 101, this is called market or audience analysis. Often you’ll have an ideal audience in mind, and then have to adapt your strategy once you encounter the real thing. Somehow, the fine social media experts behind the Obamacare viral campaign either skipped that chapter in their marketing textbook, or didn’t quite understand the concept.
Back in 2013, the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and the ProgressNow Colorado Education organization rolled out their “Got Insurance?” campaign that targeted “young adults, families, women, and minority groups”, which as you can clearly see, are sufficiently covered with their “Brosurance” ads. Their ad, featuring stereotypical college males engaged in the time honored tradition of doing a kegstand, particularly screams “family values”. Sadly, the individuals not covered in the “bro” demographic didn’t relate to the viral campaign as intended. As a result, this campaign went down in the history books as a major miss instead of a witty, tongue and cheek way of relating to the good citizens of Colorado.
Take Home Lesson: the question “can I get your opinion on this?” is your best friend.
Mistake 3: Forgetting to check in on your reputation every now and then
Over time, as people continue to encounter your content, a reputation is bound to creep up. We all hope that this reputation is positive, which tends to be one of the very reasons we use social media to begin with. Since user generated content is a great way to build authentic relationships with our audience, a common strategy to create this positive reputation is by inviting users to contribute to a common theme. Hashtags, for example, have become great examples of how companies and websites can bring people together under a common theme. These, of course, have certain limitations. No matter how trendy your hashtag is, it can’t be used to polish a turd into a golden nugget.
McDonalds and the NYPD respectively learned this lesson the hard way. Both organizations fell victim to the phenomena of a “bashtag”, where hashtags meant to prop a company up on a pedestal are used to beat the crap out of the company’s reputation. In McDonald’s case, their simple attempt to have people share their heartwarming #mcdstories became an invitation for former employees, disloyal customers, and hobby internet trolls to share some of the horrors they’ve witnessed behind the golden arches. McDonalds quickly pulled the campaign after just two hours, but that proved to be enough time for the hashtag to become viral regardless.
The NYPD met a similar fate with their own attempt to get New Yorkers to post pictures of themselves with police officers under the #mynypd hashtag. Unfortunately, even New York’s finest couldn’t escape the viral stigma of police brutality. Contributors rose to the occasion with pictures showing officer misconduct during official arrests and other law enforcement matters. The hashtag mishap did extra damage when other cities decided to get in on the action by posting similar content under hashtags including #mylapd, #myapd, and #mycpd.
It’s important to note that this kind of mistake can be harder to foresee depending on the context. Whether McDonalds or the NYPD truly deserved the bashing they received is a subjective matter. Unfortunately, what is a cold hard fact is that you can never control how your audience will react to a call for contributions. Sometimes the risk might not be worth the reward.
Take Home Lesson: the Saturday morning cartoons were right: unchecked, unwarranted vanity can be deadly.
Mistake 4: Lacking a basic degree of common sense
In most circles, the terms “common sense” and “the internet” typically don’t go together in the same sentence. Within social media advertising, however, one would hope these would be an inseparable pair. Some ideas typically run counter to what common sense dictates. When this occurs, social media users come to a fork in the road: choose to forget the idea and try again, or silence that nagging feeling in your brain and go full steam ahead. Whoever was running Home Depot’s visual advertising in 2013 chose the latter.
The national hardware corporation found itself in the middle of a home made racial controversy after a picture was posted on Twitter that featured two African American employees flanking a man in a gorilla suit, all drumming on buckets during a “College Gameday”. Normally, the image itself would fit in the simple “poor taste” category, but the poster of the tweet added an extra amount of spice with the caption, “Which drummer is not like the others?” While any amount of common sense would suggest that this sort of tweet isn’t really appropriate for say, a company that makes nearly twenty billion in an average quarter, in Home Depot’s defense, keeping track of several moving pieces can be difficult. Not all the cogs in the system might share the same degree of common sense.
Thankfully, however, Home Depot quickly responded with a heartfelt apology to the individuals actively protesting the tweet online. And by “heartfelt apology”, I obviously mean a “vague ‘sorry’ that indirectly assigns the blame to someone else” sort of message they simply copied and pasted hundreds of times all over Twitter.
Take Home Lesson: it turns out a “spot the difference” gimmick can be racist under the right circumstances… who knew?
Mistake 5: Trying to capitalize on current events like an insensitive douchebag
I realize I probably worded this last mistake more harshly than you’d think would be warranted, but the following three examples should be more than enough justification. Another common social media tactic is to latch onto trending hashtags and topics that are making the rounds. This can be effective unless your content has nothing to do with the hashtag. With hashtags that relate to tragedy, this can also be effectively disastrous if you somehow wave a wand of insensitivity in the faces of those affected by the tragedy. This type of behavior usually warrants a special level of hell.
Epicurious and CelebBoutique decided to take a page out of this playbook by relating their wonderful products to the horrific tragedies of the Boston bombing and the Aurora, CO theater shooting respectively.
Epicurious expressed their sympathies for the Boston bombing by suggesting people comfort themselves with a good ole’ bowl of “breakfast energy”. CelebBoutique, on the other hand, found that the trending hashtag Aurora was clearly due to their “Kim K. inspired Aurora dress”.
Not to be outdone in the category of “horrifying product advertisements”, fashion company Kenneth Cole decided to up the ante not once, but twice. During the Arab Spring back in 2011, the company made an elementary attempt to connect the dots between “Arab Spring” and their fabulous new spring collection. After a major uproar from the online community, the company quickly apologized.
Due to either a severe case of amnesia, or deciding that practice makes perfect, KC made the exact same play two years later. This time, the company tried to spring board off of the phrase “boots on the ground” into a reminder that sandals, pumps, and loafers are shoes you should definitely buy as well. Experts remain uncertain, but many believe that this marks the point that KC’s marketing director finally shed those last pesky bits of his soul.
Take Home Lesson: don’t act like an insensitive douchebag!
There you have it – a simple list of social media mistakes to avoid. The rest is now up to you.
Article originally published on Viral.Works