When venturing out into Social Media-Land, you want to keep a few things in mind.
Don’t leave common sense at home.
Twitter is a fun way to connect with people and attract new business. However, you want to be sensitive to other people because what you think may be funny, may not really be funny but offensive. This just happened to Gilbert Gottfried, comedian and the raspy voice of Aflac’s duck in commercials.
From TMZ, Gottfried made light of Japan’s tsunami by tweeting things such as “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.” and “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.'”
Even if you chuckled, it’s not the type of tweet you want hundreds of thousands of people to hear. Kenneth Cole discovered the same thing when he tried to use the riots in Egypt to promote his clothing line by tweeting, “Millions are in an uproar in Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new Spring line collection is now available online at …….”
Cole was lambasted by the media and general public for taking a serious event where people were getting hurt or killed, and using it to promote his clothing. I’m sure we’ll hear similar opinions regarding Gottfried.
Use your Twitter for good, not evil. Use it to promote your business, but be careful when trying to use current events for extra oomph. Stay away from using humor regarding riots, natural disasters, or mass shooting sprees. Trust me. It wont’t go over well. Meanwhile, here are some ideas for how you can use Twitter to “hook” into some current trends:
- “X Celebrity just pledged herself to building a ‘greener life.’ She should see our new green line of soaps!”
- “Y City was just named the happiest city on earth. We bet they discovered our new energy drink BZZ, too!”
- “The Buckeyes just won the championship! Celebrate with our new line of OSU sportswear!”
Look for positive news and then see if there’s a way to use that to positively promote your business. You’ll get a smile from people instead of hearing them say, “What were they thinking?!”