Earlier this month, UCC coffee, one of the popular coffee manufactures in Japan, made a big mess on Twitter in a matter of days. Here’s what happened.
They have been running “Good Coffee Smile Campaign” since 1999 using mas-media. This year, they decided to use Twitter in addition to ads on TV, newspaper and magazines. On Feb 5, they set up 11 bot accounts to push tweets to people, who used words such as “coffee” “ucc” and “campaign”. Immediately, this “campaign” back-fired, and on Feb 7, they suspended Twitter campaigns and posted an apology on one of the accounts.
This shows how different social media is from the traditional advertising and the marketing. You should never use social media to “push” something. If you are not willing to communicate – socialize with the people, you should stick to banner ads.
