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Top 10 corporate social media fails

Yesterday Tesco caused ripples on the internet with a cringey tweet trying to mooch in on a feud ...
Newstalk
Newstalk

13.59 23 Jul 2015


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Top 10 corporate social media...

Top 10 corporate social media fails

Newstalk
Newstalk

13.59 23 Jul 2015


Share this article


Yesterday Tesco caused ripples on the internet with a cringey tweet trying to mooch in on a feud between rappers Meek Mills (Nicki Minaj's boyfriend) and Drake (Nicki Minaj's ex-boyfriend) - after the former accused the latter of not writing his own rhymes..

The Twitter account @BrandsSayingBae keeps track of similar instances of company social media accounts "talking like teenagers" to make people want to "buy the corporation's products."

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Last year DiGiorno Pizza spotted #WhyIStayed trending on twitter - and decided to get in on the act without investigating any further:

The hashtag was actually being used to discuss domestic violence, as women shared stories about staying with abusive partners in the wake of a video emerging showing NFL star Ray Rice beating his wife in an elevator.

Food website Epicurious decided that in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing it would tweet out some local recipes to comfort its more than 600,000 followers...

This next tweet might look like the type of thing that you would expect to see on an NRA twitter-feed - the problem is that it was posted the morning after the mass-shooting in Colorado at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

To make things worse, all other NRA accounts were silent as the organisation worked on co-ordinating its post-shooting media strategy.

In big organisations generally a lot of people end up with access to social accounts - and there's always the risk of someone going rogue.

Irish HMV staff took to the official twitter account to live tweet their sacking when the company went into administration in 2013.

 

Secondary-market ticket site StubHub also suffered the wrath of a disgruntled employee tweeting from the company account after a long week of work...

 

We're not sure if this is a tone-deaf fail, or a trolling win for Tesco - this is how it signed-off from Twitter on the day that the horse meat burger controversy broke.

 

NYPD tried to 'engage' people by asking them to post photos with police, with the hashtag #MyNYDP.

This backfired pretty spectacularly as users posted photos of instances of police brutality.

It didn't help that it came at a time when its "Stop and frisk" policy was causing controversy as the vast majority of the New Yorkers subjected to random searches were black or Latin American.

Our Guards are also pretty active on social media...

McDonald's #McStories campaign in early 2012 was one of the original hijacked sponsored hashtag campaigns.

Users were quick to upload their own tales from the restaurant...

This Home Depot tweet resulted in two days of apologies - and its social media agency getting fired:

 

 


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