Habitat and Twitter: what are the lessons to learn?

Habitat’s been in the news, in a bad way, for its recent foray into the world of Twitter.

Although it’s a firm with a solid reputation for its service and its goods, that hasn’t transferred over to its tweeting. Instead, Habitat has been widely condemned – and apologised – for adding irrelevant hashtags to its tweets. At its simplest, what Habitat did was to find the tags people were using the most on Twitter and then add them to its messages, even when those messages were about something completely different. The hope was that people searching for those popular tags would therefore find Habitat’s tweets – which they did, but on finding that the messages were about something else, they reacted badly.

Habitat has now pulled the offending messages, said it was due to an over-enthusiastic intern and apologised, but what are the lessons to learn?

First, even if you have only a small number of followers, friends or fans on your social media presence, it is still a very high profile part of your public face on the world. Whilst there is often much valuable work that an intern can do to help manage such presences, you also need some experienced hands involved.

Second, there is a very big gap between what you can do and what you should do. Twitter lets you use tags unrelated to your messages. Email lets you put scores of people’s email addresses all in the “To:” line. And so on. Many of the mistakes are ones that it’s easy for a well-intentioned but naïve person to make. You need to immerse yourself in the world in order to learn the etiquette and styles that are appropriate.

Third, stories move very quickly. Habitat’s official response was, by traditional media standards, reasonably quick. But in some ways, it was already too late – as the original story about their mistakes had already spread far and wide. The social media cycle looks very different from many other media cycles.

Fourth, once your story has caught the eye of people online, you will get an online commentary on what you are doing. If you’ve not experienced this before, it can be a little unnerving. Imagine if, when you are on the phone to journalists, you had someone standing over your shoulder muttering, “I wouldn’t have said that”, “That third sentence conflicts with what your website said yesterday” or “I don’t like the colour of your shirt”. The details of what you say – or don’t say – are likely to get a thorough forensic analysis, so being as fulsome and explicit as you can be is usually required.

Fifth, but for all that criticism and commentary, most of the people taking a detailed interest have made at least one serious mistake themselves at some point. Moreover, they are generally believers in the power of social media and welcoming of more people using it. Apologising and reacting appropriately taps into that potential well of sympathy.

Sixth, mistakes offer a great opportunity. It’s usually best not to make the mistake in the first place … but once you’ve made the mistake and got people’s attention, it means you can get much more publicity for starting to do things right than if you’d never made the mistake.

At the time of writing, HabitatUK has 774 followers. Compare that with OcadoUK’s 290. Ocado looks to be doing well with its Twitter presence, but courtesy of its current notoriety, Habitat has got a much larger audience it can now talk to – not to mention all those who have pens poised ready to add Habitat to their list of case studies as the bad guy turned good.

Will Habitat manage that transformation? We’ll see…