Kelloggs’ Twitter breakfast blunder

It’s easy to find plenty of examples of best practice use of Social Media from UK brands and it’s encouraging that as Social Media becomes more established, it’s much harder to find examples of bad use.

But well known brands still get it wrong. Kelloggs’ found itself in a Twitter storm over the weekend following the tweet below which is part of their #GiveAChildABreakfast campaign.

This caused a barrage of tweets to @KelloggsUK with many questioning the wisdom of donating breakfasts to vulnerable children in return from publicity via retweets. Here’s an example from BBC Science Presenter, James Wong.

“@KelloggsUK: 1RT = 1 breakfast for a vulnerable child” Anyone else find this kinda creepy? Like sayin “Help us advertise or kids go hungry”

— James Wong (@Botanygeek) November 9, 2013

Whilst setting up breakfast clubs is a fantastic and noble idea, with Kelloggs funding breakfasts for vulnerable children throughout the UK, the Social Media strategy is not appropriate. Kelloggs should leave people to decide whether they want to retweet rather than implying they had to do so to help fund the breakfasts. This tweet from @KelloggsUK yesterday, appears to contradict the campaign implying that breakfast clubs are already funded:

Kellogg’s is funding 1,000 breakfast clubs this year with grants and food vouchers. To find out more go to: http://t.co/cIzupkF3FO

— Kellogg’s UK (@KelloggsUK) November 10, 2013

 

Encouragement to share tweets like the one below on setting up breakfast clubs would have been a much better idea:

Starting a new breakfast club? Visit http://t.co/Wg1augAaZq to receive funding, cereal+ ideas on how set up your school’s breakfast club

— Kellogg’s UK (@KelloggsUK) October 30, 2013

The company did apologise yesterday morning and whilst difficult to do so in 140 characters it doesn’t really go far enough.

We want to apologise for the recent tweet, wrong use of words. It’s deleted. We give funding to school breakfast clubs in vulnerable areas.

— Kellogg’s UK (@KelloggsUK) November 10, 2013

Credit to Kelloggs for apologising but it’s not just ‘wrong use of words’ but the whole strategy behind the Social Media campaign. There’s just something not quite right about encouraging people to generate awareness around the breakfast clubs initiative.

On the Kelloggs UK Facebook Page, there is plenty of encouragement to ‘raise awareness’, although this is an improvement on past posts (since edited) including one which asked Fans to ‘help us to keep school breakfast clubs running by sharing this post.

What do you think of Kelloggs’ #GiveAChildABreakfast Social Media campaign?

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This entry was posted in Social Media Examples and tagged bad social media, example, Kelloggs, twitter by Jonathan Pollinger+. Bookmark the permalink.