The same day that WW, the company formerly known as Weight Watchers, launched their New Years resolution promotion on Twitters trending page (#ThisIsMyWW), the United States government was launching something else. And it just wasnt a hashtag.
A week ago, the United States launched an airstrike that ended the life of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Right around the same time, WW launched a promotion intended for users of their weight-loss program to share their customized food and exercise plans for the new year with the #ThisIsMyWW as a promoted hashtag.
The timing was not the greatest, to say the least, making WW the first brand of the year to prove that timing is still everything for brands coming into 2020. The question is, however, how brands can make sure that they are following this rule and not launching a campaign the same day that World War III is a top trending topic on Twitter.
Below are my top tips on how to carefully monitor not only what you do and the community youre a part of, but everything else happening in our nonstop world to ensure that you dont make the same mistake that WW made.
This may seem obvious to most, but its been proven time and time again that there is nothing better than a good plan with data and insights to back it up. Theres a reason this is one of the oldest and most constant practices in advertising. We should really know better than making the mistakes our industry has made in the past.
Put your campaign in a doomsday situation and imagine the absolute worst that could come of it and of any correlating factors that could also hurt it. This is an exercise that may seem unnecessary, but when youre going against the meme generation and internet trolls, youll see social media users can turn anything into a negative.
Within the first few days of launching a new campaign, hire someone to monitor the promotion as much as possible or invest in a social listening tool. Social listening tools have developed over the last decade faster than almost any social media tool. These can be used to ensure that if a crisis like this happens, you have the ability to set alerts based on keywords that come up in your what if scenario. This allows you to pull or pause the campaign at any given time, and quickly. Not like the two days it took WW to act.
If something like this does happen, know its OK to take the promotion down, like WW eventually did. If you do have to pull the campaign, dont hide from it. Make sure you acknowledge the fact that the company has realized whats going on in the world and actually cares. If something starts on social media then suddenly disappears, usually it only gets worse for the brand. The trolls dont go away. WW saw this with people retweeting and commenting for nearly five days after they made the decision to stop their promotion.
No matter how much research you have done or scenarios youve put your campaign through, there are things that come up in which you may not be able to predict. WW is a perfect example of this. Unfortunately, they handled it poorly by reacting slowly and not having the proper systems in place. Because of these mistakes, it allowed over 870,000 people to discuss the topic just on Twitter alone in less than three days.
Originally posted here:
4 Lessons From WWs Ill-Timed Promoted Tweet That Ran While WWIII Was Trending - Adweek
