"The five biggest social media fails"

Brick and mortar stores are turning to social media sites as a way to promote their brand: Here are some of their biggest mistakes 

The mix of old brands and new media has led to several unfortunate social media mishaps. We take a look back at some of the worst implementations of social media advertising.

With companies constantly looking for new ways to connect to their customers it was inevitable that the globe’s biggest brands would turn to social media sites as a means of promoting their products. Guinness has this month launched a campaign using QR codes on its glasses. QR (Quick Response) codes are square barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone to direct the user to a website. The feature will supposedly let you update your “Guinness pint-drinking status” on Facebook and get money-off coupons for your next pint. Whilst in theory it seems like a good idea we can’t remember the last time we scanned a QR code, let alone had any interest in updating our “pint-drinking status.”

While Guinness's scheme might succeed, it feels like a gimmick that is doomed to fail. Here are four other examples of brands trying to grasp social media and failing badly.

Habitat’s Trending Topics
In June 2009 British furniture store Habitat jumped on the Twitter band wagon, utilising the trending topics feature as a way of promoting their £1,000 giveaway. Whilst the majority of the tweets used harmless hashtags such as #TRUE BLOOD and #AT&T Habitat was criticised for using the hashtags #IRAN and #MOUSAVI which pertained to the protested Iranian election result that year. Habitat offered a swift apology and promptly fired the intern responsible for the mishap.

Skittles’ Search Terms
The marketing guys at Mars Incorporated, the producer of Skittles, thought it would be a great idea to let the users of twitter take over the skittles.com homepage, turning it into a list of tweets that had the word “skittles” in them. Whilst, presumably, the team at Mars thought this would lead to a bunch of tweets from users talking about how great skittles were the internet quickly cottoned on to the fact that the website wasn’t being screened by anyone and pounced. Instead of tweets about how great skittles were the website was saturated with hundreds of offensive tweets that incorporated “skittles” in the body of the tweet.

Snickers’ Sponsorship
Another attempt from the marketing team at Mars Incorporated to boost their product sales led to a full blown investigation by the Advertising Standards Agency in 2012 after it emerged the company was paying celebrities to tweet about Snickers.

The move by Mars saw the company paying celebrities such as Rio Ferdinand, Katie Price and Ian Botham to post bizarre “teaser tweets” before finally revealing “You’re not you when you’re hungry” followed by a link to the Snickers website. Twitter users responded by asking things like “Do you really need money that bad” and “I’m not on here to be advertised at.” The company was cleared by the Advertising Standards Agency.

Microsoft’s Facebook Poll
In late 2011 Microsoft’s Windows Phone division decided to run a poll on Facebook to find out “what was the first feature you loved about the Nokia Lumia 800.” Whilst, to the inexperienced internet user, this seems like a great idea, a battle scarred internet veteran would not think to make such a rookie mistake.

As with the Skittles campaign, users of the website quickly realised that they could add their own voting options to the poll and immediately inappropriate options such as “nothing, its s---” and “the mickey-mouse PR that thought it would be great to let people make up options,” began to appear and became some of the most voted on answers.