News from the Herd

Dirk Singer

Over the weekend, Tiphereth Gloria's blog (the excellent 'Digital Tip') over in Australia alerted me to an incidence of Twitter madness from UK furniture retailer Habitat.  The story has now extended to mainstream news outlets picking it up, for example see this piece by Sky's Twitter correspondent Ruth Bartlett.

In a nutshell, Habitat didn't just blast out price lists and special offers via its Twitter feed.   That would have been fairly harmless, if pointless, as with Twitter you can of course decide to unfollow anyone who doesn't take your fancy.   Instead, they forced themselves into popular conversations by the use of hash tags - the way in which popular trends and subjects on Twitter are grouped.   This included things like #iPhone, which meant that if you were searching Twitter for info about Apple's smartphone you would have come across Habitat's posts.

Spammers and get rich quick merchants use this method of getting attention through hash tags all the time.   But it's not what you'd expect from a premium brand.

However the worst thing was that whoever Habitat outsourced its feed to also used hash tags to do with the Iranian elections, a crisis which has of course cost lives.   Above there is an example where they used #Mousavi (after the Iranian opposition leader) to call for people to join their database.  The reaction from the Twitter community was pretty much as you'd expect, below is a small selection.

Habitat has now admitted its mistake, though in fairly mild terms and in brand speak.  It's also scrubbed its twitter feed clean, though the results live on thanks to the joys of search.

My guess, for what it's worth, is that the Habitat press office had nothing to do with this directly.   Communications professionals would (hopefully!) not think it a good idea to spam Iran election feeds with info about flat packed furniture.   I could be wrong of course but instead I assume that they outsourced this job to someone - and someone who knew something about Twitter, as a complete novice wouldn't be clued up on hash tags. And that the brief read 'get us X,000 followers fast!' (or words to that effect.)

If so, perhaps it's a case for checking out the credentials and online footprint of whatever social media "expert" you bring on a little more closely?

Update (25 June) - Habitat has published an apology and put it down to the fact that they turned their feed over to an over enthusiastic Intern.