Did any of you see the case of HabitatUK and Twitter this week? The furniture retailer was adding keywords (aka hashtags) to their tweets to ensure that its messages were coming up in the hot topics on the microblogging site. Don’t get us wrong here, we don’t condone their ‘abuse’ of the system, but we do embrace the attempt by the furniture store to use social networking.
The fact that this story caused so much of a stir in the first place suggests the tactic worked. The head honchos at Habitat, despite the negative slant on the story, must be overjoyed with the “free” publicity. As someone famous once said: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Unless it’s our own obituary. That’s pretty bad.
A quick apology on Sky News for the “abuse”, and that’s scant payment for tech sites and news channels across the UK talking about your furniture store. Seriously this must be the most coverage Habitat’s had since they started selling those awesome pebble lights. No? They’re really good.
What I’m trying to say is, essentially the principles used here were good ones. Using keywords (hastags) to get your story noticed. It’s the same principle for stories in Google. You just have to ensure that you stick to the unwritten code of social media ethics. Using keywords that have nothing to do with your story (we fail to see what iPhone 3GS, Apple and Iran have to do with Habitat) is just bad practice. You might even call it mis-tweetment. Ha ha. HA!
That said I don’t think the bosses at Habitat will be too angry. Like I said, I don’t remember the last time this furniture company was hitting the headlines. Now, if only they could learn to use social media properly…