How Twitter Can Ruin a Marketing Campaign

How Twitter Can Ruin a Marketing Campaign

HP.com brings a knife to a gunfight

When social networking sites hit the Internet, companies spent many, many months watching it with a wary eye. But once leading IT companies (such as Sun, Dell, and Cisco) took the leap, the race to integrate social media into a company’s marketing mix was on. This has led almost every company to declare social media as a major influence—if not the cornerstone—of its future marketing strategies.

Bold pronouncements aside, the reality is this: most companies are scared silly because they don’t have the faintest idea about how and when to use social media to their advantage.

They should be scared.

As a case in point, let’s consider how HP.com’s new “Change the rules of networking” campaign and associated Web page goes off the rails. This page launches the new face of HP Networking using the perfect combination of “hip & happenin’” content. Lightbox videos. Web 2.0 behaviors. Twitter. You name it.  With all of these cool new ingredients, where could HP.com possibly go wrong?

Let us count the ways.

True to its new “voice of the market” strategy, HP.com is using Twitter feeds to create rich marketing content. Unfortunately, the “market” doesn’t seem to be very impressed. With so little space available for people to adequate state their case, the tweets amount to little more than insults and “happy talk” retweets by HP employees. Hardly the rich discourse and market endorsements HP had in mind.

Twitter formats make damage control difficult, if not impossible. It’s easy to hurl insults in 140 characters – and almost impossible to counter them in the same space. Twitter’s disconnected rolling dialogs also make it virtually impossible for any company to start a conversation and effectively connect the dots. The net result? A rolling critique of HP’s Network strategy on a campaign page that is intended to pitch HP as a change agent in the networking industry.

So much for using “the voice of the market” as the “hip & happenin’” way to create rich marketing content.

Real estate counts. Most companies practice their own forms of damage control by limiting their tweet rolls to a revolving line in the body of a main page (great for speed readers) or stuffing them in the right panel (perfect when you want to look “cool” but don’t really want visitors to read the tweets).

HP.com, in contrast, dedicates half of its page to these ongoing “conversations”. This is a perfect formula when the tweets are happy talk and kudos. No so much when “market voices” are opining that Cisco is the better choice. 

The Bottom Line | HP.com provides a cautionary tale for any company planning to use Twitter as “rich marketing content”. on marketing pages. Twitter is a horrible marketing platform that can slip out from under you at the drop of a hat.  Its 140 character format doesn’t allow people to fully state and justify their opinions, or allow company moderators to respond effectively. As important, these Twitter feeds demand full-time moderators. If they aren’t on your plan, consider it another reason to avoid Twitter like the plague.

And what about HP.com’s Change the Rules of Networking campaign and associated page? Think of this as a prime example of a Twitter as social media hole—and why HP.com should stop digging.