2 Social Media Marketing Failures

The idea behind this blog post is to have a look at two well known brands who failed miserably at Social Media Marketing, a little look at what they did and what they could have done to run the campaign better.

I guess the positive thing to come out of all this is that Social Media Marketing really is coming into the main-stream marketing and big brands are recognising that a successful SMM (Social Media Marketing) campaign can do wonders for their brand and sales.

Walmart

Walmart have announced that they are soon to launch their third attempt at SMM by allowing users to review content on their site, yet if they handle it like they did their last campaign its going to go into the same direction.

What did they do? Walmart launched a Social network site launched at kids on the walmart website named ‘The Hub’.

Why did it fail?

• Emailed Parents - Parents have to be informed of every new registration which isnt very ‘cool’ for the kids although its great for parents
• Screened Content - Kids join Social Networks to express themselves how they want to express themselves. Not to have a 3rd party look over what they wrote and edit parts of it
• Kids Couldnt Communicate - Whats a social network without kids being able to leave private messages or send emails to each other? You have to get the basic requirements right to make things a success

What Could they have done better? Realised that just one stage of child-protection is the best they can do to keep kids safe while building a popular social network. You have to give people control and have the ability to allow two-way conversations to flow without you being the only one talking. Im sure if they had a better and more lenient system in place they would have no problem getting kids to signup and be active on the site.

Titleist

Titleist are a major golfing product manufacturer and probably not a name you would associate with any forms of Internet Marketing let alone Social Marketing but they actually came pretty close to doing a good job.

What Did they Do? Created a website for a fictional golfer and promoted it offline using formats like television advertising during major golf tournaments.

Why did it fail?

• Offline Marketing - For an online campaign can sometimes work but its so muc easier and cheaper to get things promoted online. A good example Danny Sullivan gave was to give some relevant bloggers some free golf balls and hope they will talk about it
• No Call-to-Action - Although the site really isnt that bad theres no call to action for people to share the content or any incentives for them to upload music and videos which the site hopes they will do
• Not Great Content - People seem to forget all too easily that good content just wont go viral, great content can and sometimes will. The videos on the site are good but they arent great, perhaps a bit more work into this side of things would have left a completely different output despite where the advertising came from

What Could they have done better? Titleist really should have looked at ways to promote their product online via the blogosphere and social websites like youtube where they could have gotten the video some attention and more website traffic. Dont spend big dollars on TV advertising if you dont have a website to back it up as to be fair there was really nothing special about their NXTube website, unless they hoped to get all the links as an SMM failure?

Summary

Its good to see that SMM / SMO really is getting into mainstream marketing and despite these two well-documented failures there has been a lot of success for big brands in this space which I will cover in another post. I hope you enjoyed looking at why an SMM campaign can fail and how you can avoid the same mistakes!