Social Media Campaigns — The good, the bad and the ugly
Aided by recent events, we are hurtling faster and faster into an online world. No more so is this evident than in everyone’s favourite procrastination destination: Social Media.
What are Social Media Campaigns?
With more and more people spending time on social media, whether through Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or even LinkedIn, one thing you can be sure of is that advertisers will follow where the people go. Social media campaigns can take many different formats; it can be something as simple as a tweet to something a little more complex, like a coordinated multi-channel marketing effort spanning multiple platforms.
The key to getting social media campaigns right relies on a mixture of creativity and a strategic focus. Being creative will make the campaign stand out and create an impact on your target audience. Maintaining some form of measurable strategic slant grounds your campaign and keeps it on track to ensure you are influencing the target audience as you intend to do so. When you do these things right, it can elevate a campaign and genuinely influence a target audience to feel or act depending on what you are aiming to achieve; it can also sometimes result in that, oh so desirable of an outcome — going viral.
Why do they work?
So why do social media campaigns work so well, and why are they here to stay? It’s very simple. Social media allows unprecedented reach. Social media will enable you to reach the right person in the right place at the right time, in ways that traditional media can only dream of. As we evolve into a new breed of an online social creature, social media campaigns can create impact in compelling ways. Also, and probably most importantly, all of this can be done extremely cheaply. All of this means that if a business, any business, wants to remain relevant, it needs to perfect its social media game.
With this in mind, let’s look at some examples of good, bad and just plain ugly attempts at social media.
The Good — Getty Museum
The Getty Museum based in Los Angeles holds countless incredible paintings, drawings, sculptures, manuscripts and relies on getting people to visit the museum to raise money. So, faced with a global pandemic and a complete reduction of foot traffic, the Getty Museum was faced with an interesting challenge. How do we engage with the public remotely? How do we get and keep people interested and engaged with the museum to visit the website, possibly purchase merchandise or plan to visit when the pandemic finally ends? The answer to this was a simple but very effective social media campaign. The Getty Museum Challenge challenged members of the public to choose their favourite artwork, find things lying around the house and then recreate the artwork as best they could, resulting in some genius, some comical and some bizarre interpretations of famous art pieces.
This campaign worked so well as it allowed people to really get involved and be as creative or as silly as they wanted to be with the challenge. This generated enormous amounts of positive feedback from the public, allowing people to have an experience even while stuck in the boredom of lockdown. This engagement allowed this campaign to completely take off as it inspired more and more people to get involved and share the content with friends and family, resulting in the fabled going viral. The Getty Museum Challenge is a pure and simple example of how to do a social media campaign right.
The Bad — British Gas Q&A
Way back in 2013, British Gas had a simple idea to run a Q & A campaign via Twitter, allowing anyone to table any questions they had for British Gas. The Customer Service Director would directly answer all questions. An excellent simple idea that gets your customers engaging with you on social media. What could go wrong, right? A whole lot. See, there are many hurdles for a social media campaign to jump over to be successful, such as being creative enough, reaching the right audience, and so on. This campaign fell at the planning hurdle. See, at the time, British Gas had just announced that they would be sharply increasing energy prices prior to this campaign. As you can imagine, the Twitter community seized the opportunity to ask some challenging questions, such as have you found a way to channel angry customer feedback into electricity yet? Or will you be passing on the cost savings from firing your social media team to customers?
What was meant as a simple idea turned into a PR nightmare as it drew even more attention to an already complex issue of increasing prices, a position no company wants to be in. British Gas could easily have avoided this disaster if a little more planning had gone into the campaign. That’s not to say you need to shy away from social media when delivering bad news to your customers, quite the opposite, actually, but don’t slap a target on yourself and draw more attention to the situation.
The Ugly — Burger King
I mean, what a mess. Where do we begin? The offence statement, the fact they posted this on international women’s day, the muddled announcement of its scholarship programme. So, you can see here that Burger King is trying to make quite the impact with this charged and sexist statement. Posting this on International Women’s Day was clearly designed for maximum effect, but if ever a tweet needed some clear eyes and a rethink, this was probably it.
Now, I’m sure whoever planned this had their heart in the right place, as when you drill down a bit, you can see that Burger King is trying to draw attention to the fact that women are underrepresented in the culinary industry. To help fight this, Burger King is launching a scholarship programme to allow female staff members to pursue a career in the industry. The scholarship is a positive and great idea that offered Burger King a chance of some great publicity. However, due to twitter algorithms and subsequent tweets’ timings, the fact that this is trying to draw attention to the scholarship can get lost, especially as this tweet would inevitably cause quite the response.
One might argue that the tweet was so provocative that it resulted in significant exposure for the scholarship and Burger King, and we all know there is no such thing as bad publicity, right? Still, I am not sure. This whole campaign was a mess from start to finish and was in desperate need of a re-think. Burger King had previously run this concept as a more traditional print ad where it had the sexist statement front and centre but with additional text that offered its audience an immediate understanding of the statement’s broader context. The print ad worked in drawing people’s attention to the lack of female representation in the culinary industry as it gave you all the information. All of this shows that what works for one media format doesn’t necessarily translate to another.
