5 of 2013’s biggest social media fails

Although 2013 has been great for social, not all the campaigns that were produced this year were in fact great. Some of them were down right shocking!

Here are my top five Social media fails for 2013

Marmite Love it or hate it

Marmite’s ‘love it or hate it’ campaign was taken a step further this year which caused quite a stir online. In theory a great concept, but when executed, not so much.

The latest campaign, parodying animal cruelty appeals by “raising awareness” of woefully neglected Marmite jars across Britain, got many consumers ho under the collar.

The advert featured Marmite welfare officers visiting the homes of people who neglected their jars of yeasty spread, and rescued them from a life of abandonment. The ad featured one officer getting particularly choked up after finding a “baby Marmite jar” lingering at the back of the kitchen cupboard virtually unused. “I just hadn’t seen one that small,” the officer says to his sympathetic colleague.

The tongue-in-cheek ad provoked 250 complaints to The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after it made its debut broadcast. Needless to say social media was the driving force behind many of these complaints where users used online platforms to voice their disgust and unhappiness with Marmite’s new ad.

Spearmint Rhino’s ‘Guess the Stripper Baby Picture’ campaign

Melbourne based ‘gentlemen’s club’ Spearmint Rhino’s thought they’d be naughty and have Facebook users guess whose baby picture they uploaded. It didn’t take long for users to look at the VHS sceenshot’s time stamp and realize that the future stripper was only 14 years old. Epic #fail.

JP Morgan Twitter Q&A Campaign
JP Morgan thought a good way to engage customers would be to run enlightening Twitter Q&A session. Its downfall was that it was completely ignorant of what its brand represented to the trolling masses of the internet. Even respected journalists joined in on six hours of harassment fun.

The Boston Marathon cookie campaign
Epicurious thought it could help people relax after the Boston Bombings. Unfortunately, it also thought the best way to do so would be to post some of its recipes on Twitter. Wildly inappropriate, the outcry on twitter was massive. Huge social media #fail.

Amy’s Baking Company
This was quite possibly the biggest social media meltdown, and #fail, of the year. Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro first came to the public’s attention in May after it was featured on an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Owners Amy and Samy Bouzaglo took to their Facebook page to defend themselves against critical comments. The back-and-forth rapidly spiralled out of control, to the amusement of people following the incident on Reddit, Yelp and various other social networking sites.

After the rant they claimed that the account had been hacked, and that they were working with authorities (including the FBI) to “ensure this does not happen again.”