How Not to Run a Social Media Campaign
About the laziest thing you can do if you want to promote your business on the internet is to throw a poorly-thought-out hashtag out in an ad and ask people to tweet it. Not only are people extremely unlikely to be that into the idea of staying at a Holiday Inn Express to tweet about it, it just shows kind of a fundamental unawareness of how social media works.
Yesterday, I saw a prime example of this: a Hulu commercial from Applebees for their “spirited cuisine” menu, depicting a chef (apparently actually Christian Delpech, a bartending competition winner), doing all kinds of tricks, asking people to suggest another trick he should do by tweeting with the hashtag “#spiritedChef.”
To me, there was only one natural response.
Shove that pepper grinder up’ya ass #SpiritedChef #BadSocialMediaPromotionIdeas
— Rich Ranallo (@Polisurgist) November 12, 2013
Little did I know that I would be the only person on Earth that responded to the campaign:
They were pretty good sports about it, but I’m a little scared to accept the gift card they offered me. I may be the first person killed by Applebees who wasn’t killed by their food.