You don’t need me to tell you that social media is a real buzz word at the minute. Every man and his dog is looking to get a piece of the social media pie and big brands are no different. In fact social media is more important for big brand companies as their name and company are already in the public domain. The challenge for them is to exploit this new channel to their advantage, raising awareness and harnessing their marketing message. However, as this article points out, some big brands are finding it hard to adapt themselves to social media. It must be said though, that a few companies seem not only to be struggling to get to grips with the concept, but they are struggling even to take it seriously.

A number of companies have encountered some rather unfortunate banana skins along the way…

1. Habitat and Spammy hashtags

Last summer the Twitter account of luxury furniture chain Habitat started producing Tweets with non-furniture related hashtags attached to them. Hashtags are designed so that Twitter users can quickly and easily search for relevant content. In a miscalculated bid to appear under popular hashtags or hottrends, the company started labeling their tweets with wprds such as “mms”, “Apple” and “iPhone” hoping that those who were genuinely looking for these topics would miraculously want to blow £3,000 on one of their sofa’s. They even quite shamefully labeled one of the tweets with “Mousavi” which relates to 2009 Iranian election candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

As you might expect Habitat removed the Tweets and then went into damage limitation mode, blaming the Tweets on an inturn…”…in response to speculation, we would like to clarify – this was not done by an agency. The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.” It seems that someone was used as a scapegoat and was skillfully labeled as not being full time employee.

2. Vodafone Offensive Tweet

Mobile phone giant Vodafone also ran into some social media hot water when someone from their Stoke office manage to access the Twitter login to post the following.

In response Vodafone said that “An individual posted an obscene remark on the Vodafone UK Twitter account.  The individual has been suspended pending further notice.” It is understood the company was using the social media site to keep in touch with customers.

3. Virgin Atlantic and the Chavs taunts

13 cabin crew of transatlantic airline Virgin were sacked after it was unearthed that they had been posting messages about the airline and its passengers on a Facebook group about planes from Gatwick. Whilst this was not an official Virgin group or posted using an authorised Virgin social media profile, the company took a very dim view on the comments which included..

-452 Passengers were “Chavs”

-The planes were infested with cockroaches

-The engines had to be replaced up to four times a year.

A Virgin spokesperson said that “we do not tolerate any criticism of passengers or industry-leading safety standards.”

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