Crossing the line of social media

In a guest lecture by John Stanton from Base One when talking about plotting your landscape for social media he addressed three questions.

• Where is my audience? 
• What channels are they using? 
• What are they talking about?

From a marketing point of view it is a consensus that we need to understand our audience, from an advertising point of view we only want to address and sell to this audience. However from a public relations point of view, we are trying to build a relationship with our audience. In June 2009 popular furniture store Habitat answered these three questions, they acknowledged they have an audience online and that they were addressing them using social media power house Twitter  now the subject of the final question....what are Habitat customers talking about? It was decided they would be discussing the unrest in Iran and Mousavi and as reported in a BBC article they used this knowledge of their audience to "piggy back" on Twitter and included "hash tags" of Iran to lead people towards their page. This shameful use of social media has not only damaged the reputation of Habitat but has acted as a warning for all those using social media to advertise, along with spam messages and constant facebook updates there is a  line to cross between being an online friend with a company or by being online your company is creating enemies.