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Wal-Mart’s Social Media Marketing Transgressions
By LaSandra Brill at November 02, 2007 2 Comments
When it comes to Social Media Marketing there are few failure examples to learn from. Mainly because it’s so new but also because many failures get quietly swept under the rug. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, their mistakes are in the limelight but that gives us the opportunity to learn from them. Here are some pitfalls they could have avoided:
False Transparency - They got caught red-handed for staging thier blog (Wal-Marting Across America) leaving their readers feeling cheated and lied to. The couple who was RVing across the US turned out to be a PR stunt.
Build it and They Will Come Mentality - Last summer Wal-Mart built their own social networking site for teens. Did they really think they could compete head-to-head with MySpace? With more than 3% of their traffic coming from MySpace at that time, why not optimize that relationship and go where the community already exists? Doh! After just 10-weeks the site was taken down…
Obsessed with Control
- Their recent Facebook campaign is anything but open and genuine. If you’re going to leverage a social media platform like Facebook you have to be willing to open the kimono. Instead they decided to keep a lock down on comments and disabled the forum feature leaving visitors irritated and upset.
- They are now threatening their customers from posting Black Friday ad posts. Why would they go to such extremes - they should be rewarding people who want to talk about them - especially since it’s not threatening to their business. Reward your customers for having a voice - don’t reprimand them.
Labels: Blogs, social media marketing, social media marketing examples, Social Networking
2 Comments
It’s very interesting to watch how the large corporations struggle to incorporate the shifting (and shifty) sand of new media into their marketing strategies.
The Wal Marting deal was not nearly as bad as was reported - the folks had planned this trip anyway, though when Wal Mart offered to pay for it I think they focused a bit differently. Still, as a travel blog it was “way above average” yet Edelman was forced to remove it and apologize.
Right or wrong, we bloggers are often pretty ruthless, and this is not a good thing.
It is shocking to see how a corporation with such a successful business model cannot seem to get it right in social media
I’ve written a similiar post here if you want to read a bit more.