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Yesterday evening our team worked with Walmart and Signature by Levi Strauss & Co., using Twitter and the hashtag #sigjeans, to bring attention to a wonderful Mothers Day makeover opportunity and a contest for free cruises. Needless to say, the campaign was a huge success and the #sigjeans hashtag trended as one of the most popular topics being discussed on Twitter for the evening. Thanks to Signature by Levi Strauss & Co., the following moms celebrated an amazing Mother's Day gift!
Toni - Springdale, AR
Brandy - Newport, NH
Margaret - Velva, ND
Shannon – Edmond, OK
The purpose of this blog posting is to begin a discussion about the future of community and how we preserve the integrity of the conversation without excluding it to a trusted few.
We were fully aware of the potential for abuse when utilizing a hashtag. While we’ve done similar campaigns without incident, we have always been aware of the potential for spammers to begin using a popular hashtag that many are following to insert their own messaging or spam. Last night, after the #sigjeans conversations were complete and the contest was over, spammers began to append this hashtag along with a few other popular hashtags #startrek, #lobster, and #nerdprom. Even though the conversations around #sigjeans were wrapped up, we continued to monitor the hashtag and once we noticed they were being abused we began to immediately remove the conversations from Elevenmoms.com, all of which took about 10 to 15 minutes.
Unfortunately, with the more aggressive abuse of Twitter, the following seem to be our future options:
- Limit the conversation to only trusted users.
- Run all comments through a queue for manual approval before going live.
- Utilize filtering technology to try and catch spam comments.
While all of these options have pros and cons, they also all seem to remove both the “social” and “community” out of social community. Twitter is a great platform for facilitating real-time conversations and I strongly believe brands and consumers should be utilizing social media to connect and engage. But with the rise in abuse, I suspect brands will become increasingly hesitant to utilize these tools without strong filters and exclusions. And while abuse does not surprise me, I am very shocked and disappointed by a small number of influential users who should be leading constructive dialogue with brands but choose instead ridicule and belittlement. (For instance, I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard the Motrin Moms story told as an example of brand ignorance and “mommy power” rather than brand engagement and influence. After all, they did remove the campaign and apologize all within about 48 hours of understanding the unintentional message of their commercial.)
At Rockfish we just hosted a very successful Mind of Moms Summit with the purpose of connecting companies specifically with women who are active in social media. We recognize that as social media continues to grow and evolve that brands and consumers need to work together toward an engagement that is both authentic and transparent.
The speakers at our Mind of Moms summit represent different perspectives on some very important topics. Yet, they were all very polished in their point of view and articulate in expressing it. They demonstrated grace in recognizing that there is so much room for different opinions and approaches that can all be appropriate in context of the brands and communities involved. It’s my personal hope that it will be these types of ladies who lead the way forward and that the growing abuse doesn’t hijack what could be the most significant opportunity for brands and consumers to engage ever.