How many channels of communication are available for a business to connect with its customers in the modern world? Dozens? Hundreds? 
Thousands? Personally, I wouldn’t like to put a figure on it. Let’s just go with the highly technical term of “a lot”.
There are new channels emerging all the time. How you use these channels is up to you, but, before you start, you need a plan. And, you need to understand that the old rules no longer apply. Search Engine Marketing is not Direct Mail. Twitter is not Pay Per Click Advertising, without the ‘pay’ part. Each channel that you utilize, whether you’re just getting your feet wet or gearing up for a long-term campaign, needs to be approached, and used, in the right way.
Each of these channels is unique, just as each business is unique. What works for Wawa won’t necessarily work for Will’s Coffee Shop. What works for a blog won’t necessarily work for Facebook. What worked for your direct mail campaign 2 years ago -definitely- won’t work for Twitter.
HabitatUK figured that out earlier this week. Social Media Today has more details. Basically, someone in Habitat’s marketing department decided that it would be a brilliant idea to tag all of the tweets from Habitat’s new Twitter account with completely irrelevant (but highly popular) search tags. (You can make a word searchable in Twitter by putting a # in front of it; #Kiwi, for instance for a tweet about us, or #iphone for a tweet about your iphone.)
What it comes down to is that Habitat — clumsily – tried to apply old rules to new channels. They decided to tag their tweets with things like #Apple, #iPhone, even Iranian elections, all to advertise a (previously) well-thought of furnishings store chain. The thinking, apparently, was throw enough garbage out there, and eventually someone will respond. Sounds a lot like send someone enough credit card offers and they’ll eventually sign up.
Unfortunately for Habitat, their dumb idea backfired badly, resulting in many hundreds of negative tweets about their abuse of Twitter, effectively trashing Habitat’s brand on Twitter for the foreseeable future. Any apologies from Habitat? Nope. Another big mistake.
What Habitat didn’t bother to do was learn the rules of the new channel. Or, if they did, they decided to ignore them. Not a good idea with audiences that are a) highly vocal b) real time in their responses. Most of the time, applying old rules to new channels fails. Or, in the case of Habitat, #fails.
All of this is not to scare you off from using Twitter. Just learn the landscape. Or, if you don’t have time or inclination, find/hire someone who will. The potential for gain using Twitter is real, but so too are the pitfalls of not knowing or caring how to do it right.
