Social Media News

Social Media Examples

Social Media Tips

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.

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:

 

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

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

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?

Comments

About Jonathan Pollinger

Jonathan shows businesses how to use social media to make them thrive.

View all posts by Jonathan Pollinger →
 
This entry was posted in Social Media Examples and tagged , , , by . Bookmark the permalink.