How Not to Launch Your Company's Twitter Account #DennysFail

There are lots of reasons you want to join social media - it increases your footprint, engages with your customers, shares your content, adds value to customer experiences, and helps you manage your brand. Win-win!

But what happens when you wait to get started in social media?

You become like "Denny's"! The American Family Dining Empire proudly showcased their social media activity on their menus (at restaurants around the USA, as recently announced by cnet.com), asking customers to join their conversation on Twitter. The link displayed was twitter.com/dennys. To the customer's delight, "Dennys" in this case however was a user in Taiwan and not anyone or anything even remotely related to Denny's Diner Chain ... oops.

Clearly what you do is as important as what you don't do!

Let this be a lesson. Not only was this a huge missed opportunity, but also something that has clearly had a ripple effect well beyond a poor marketing strategy.

Unfortunate for Denny's, this spells out poor customer service on a whole new level. Ironically their slogan is "we're cooking now"... but apparently they didn't pay attention to what their marketing team was or wasn't cooking up in the kitchen.

Why would you assume someone would want to innocently hijack your brand? This is just one example. Next time don't let it be you.

Some key takeaways:

• Start early and plan ahead
• Early bird gets the worm
• Be able to have the answer to "who owns your brand"
• Track your brand and social media conversations
• Use a tool like www.knowem.com to identify if your business name is still available

Related articles:

• Top 5 Inbound Marketing Videos
• Crisis Communication is only part of your social media plan
• How to convince your executives that Inbound Marketing is important
  
  

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image source: matthewpetro.name

Comments

Posted by Rebecca Churt on Wed, Feb 24, 2010 @ 07:30 AM