You can predict a little bit more…

Most of the time it is very hard to predict how the audience is going to react to a marketing campaign. Not always the campaign reaches the expected results as predicted but they also might end up causing big problems to the company and its brand. In some painful situation the company not only have to deal with the lack of success of its campaign that does not leverage its reputation and increase sales, but also with the economic losses and the harm caused to its brand.

When we talk about this failures on the online and social media context the negative impacts can be even greater due to the massive aspect of the social media and the rapid spread attribute of this platforms.

Here are examples of two companies that have had this bad experience in the past and had to deal with an online crisis. We can learn from them!

The Brazilian brand “Bom Negocio” (translated to Good Deal) published a post on its Facebook page that would be very innocent: a picture of a couple that supposedly had bought a car on their website and was celebrating it.

The problem? The picture was a fake one and it was from one of this very popular image websites like Getty Images or ShutterStock.

The post immediately turned to be a reason for funny comments around the followers and harmed the credibility and reputation of the brand and the deals its closes. The company had to shut it down right away.

A fake picture to a real deal does not provide a lot of credibility to the deal and the business of the company. This mistake could had been easily avoided putting a real picture of the people who made the deal.

Another big mistake was made by KLM by a simple tweet they did last June.

Right after Holland won the soccer game against Mexico in the Brazil World Cup, the airline company published the following post: “Adios Amigos!” with a picture of the departure gate of one airport.

The post was not well perceived by the company’s followers and even less by the Mexicans and great part of Spanish speaker population.

Even the actor Gael Garcia Bernal criticized the Dutch company and commented: “I will never fly with this shit airline company again”. He erased the message after a while.

This is a kind of error that could be prevented. The passion about soccer in Latin American is pretty known and a comment like this can easily hurt a nation’s feeling that is already dealing with a feeling of failure.