Dunkin Donuts is currently running a competition on their Facebook business page wall. Upload your picture, add some comments and maybe they will select you to be featured as the Fan of the week. Seems simple enough, perhaps a little too simple, certainly not over imaginative. Unfortunately for them it has backfired quite badly as their wall posts are now being dominated by porn bots offering all kinds of services, most of which probably don’t come with coffee and donuts.
The screenshot below shows some of these:
As you can see, a few of the posts did actually take into account the spirit of the competition and post a regular picture with a genuine reason why they should be selected as Fan of the week. But the rest were simply ads for pornsites vaguely disguised as “personal services” ads. This unfortunately is a result of two things that plague Social Media marketing campaigns:
- Campaigns being hijacked
- Not thinking through the campaign with a “what if..” mindset
Had Dunkin Donuts stopped for a minute and thought this campaign through they would have realized that letting anyone post anything to their wall was a recipe for disaster. Admittedly Facebook lacks a moderation feature for business pages, however, it really doesn’t take much for a brand to assign someone to monitor the page every few hours and remove offensive posts. This time this seems to have either been overlooked or simply missed as a feature of the campaign.
Yes Facebook provides free micro-sites in the form of business pages, which means you can focus more as a business on the message and less on the development costs of having a custom site built. However, this is a great example of the downside of believing that Social Media is free or is in fact Internet-Lite. It isn’t, just because your eleven year old can create a Facebook page for you doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you to do. Resource your projects properly.
This undoubtedly will become another “what not to do” case study for Social Media presenters and one that could very easily have been avoided.
Got a Social Media horror story to share? Leave it in the comments.
| I'm glad you took the time to read this post. |
| If you enjoyed it I'm sure you'll enjoy my once a week newsletter - Did You See..? - I'll send you a few stories from around the web that cover Social, Digital and Mobile Marketing that I found useful. It's a quick but informative read |
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
The Book