It is time again for an another social media failure – this time from Toyota. What Toyota’s CamryEffect campaign did was pure and total Twitter spam. The Toyota account @CamryEffect was replying to users who used a Super Bowl related hashtag like #Giants or #Patriots with an offer to win a car.
What made this worse is that Toyota set up verified accounts for @CamryEffect alongside @CamryEffect1, @CamryEffect2 and so on – in total 10 accounts. This allowed the company to effectively spam their Twitter campaign to every user who was using Super Bowl related hashtags. Take a look at this “promotion” from one of Toyota’s accounts:
Users were bombarded with the same tweets over and over again.
Toyota apologized for the spam campaign via a statement:
We apologize to anyone in the Twitterverse who received an unwanted @reply over the past few days. We were excited to share the message of our Camry Effect campaign in a new way and it was never our intention to displease anyone. We’ve certainly learned from this experience and have suspended the accounts effective immediately to avoid any additional issues. Kimberley Gardiner, National Digital Marketing & Social Media Manager, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. Inc.
This is just another example of social media failure. What can we learn from social media failures?
Short URL & title:
Just another social media failure — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/tzn
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The lesson (that should be) learned here is simple;
Marketing professionals who do not use social media, should not be allowed to “use” social media!