By Alan S. Morrison
This morning Mr MoneySavingExpert, Martin Lewis, launched a
crusade (check out its manifesto in his Daily
Telegraph article, it’s more than a campaign) to have people resist the
peer pressure to buy Christmas presents for non-family members so as to avoid
unnecessary spending and waste.
To promote the article and the campaign, Telegraph editor
Tony Gallagher tweeted
a headline and link at 9.11am. Martin Lewis retweeted it almost immediately to
his 178,239 followers. Seven minutes later he was tweeting
to ask people not to automatically slate it, but read the details first.
Nineteen minutes later he tweeted
his gratitude that people were supporting him. But, crucially, he included the
hashtag #banXmaspresents
After retweeting a few tweets of support from his
followers, he put out an appeal at
10.12am for retweets with the hashtag to get it trending.
By 11:24am he admitted
that he was starting to get abuse on Twitter for his call and asked the antis
to read the article before coming to judgement.
Three minutes later he was, all credit to him, retweeting a
comment
that, I believe, gets to the heart of the lack of wholehearted support — the
hashtag.
People just reading that and the call for support were,
wrongly, writing him off as a Scrooge and telling him where to stick his
humbug.
After a few more retweets of support, by 12.03pm
he felt it necessary to explain further while repeating the hashtag again.
Which he wouldn’t have needed to do if he had chosen a
better hashtag in the first place. I actually tweeted
him a suggestion - #KeepXmastoFamily I haven’t yet had a reply.
So what’s the lesson here? Simply, if you’re going to
create a custom hashtag, do it with care. While it’s perfectly possible he
created this one for maximum controversy (to gain most free media coverage of
his campaign), I’d say it has at least partially backfired on him by alienating
potential supporters who only had time to read the tweet and not follow the
link to the full explanation.
The thing with hashtags is that, like newspaper headlines, they
should help communicate the core of what you’re saying, or at least the
feeling. They’re often best used for humorous, often sarcastic, comment on the
rest of the message and can be very effective as rallying calls for support on
a heartfelt issue. But they must be quickly and easily understood properly,
which this one, IMHO, isn’t.
If he’d chosen a better one the amount of abusive reaction
from misunderstanding would have been reduced to those who purely disagreed
with what he’s actually saying, not them plus people defending gift-giving. Who
knows what damage has been done to the brand of him and his company as a
result.
For a big company like his, with long-established
credentials as championing the public, this will likely be a blip on the road.
But for smaller firms who are less well-known the potential reputational damage
of such an error could be catastrophic.
One careless tweet can be misremembered for a long time
and, as the old saying goes, it can take years to build a good reputation and
five minutes to ruin it.
Martin Lewis may well be the money-saving expert, but he
still has a few things to learn about managing his reputation online.
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