Like McDonald's before it, RIM has found there's a reason open-ended Twitter campaigns are called "bashtags."
The trouble started on New Year's Eve, when the brand sponsored Dick Clark's show and ran a billboard in New York's Times Square: "Let's #BeBold in 2012." RIM claims it received more than 35,000 "appropriate" responses to its billboard ad. The responses, which included consumers' resolutions for the coming year, were used to make the infographic below.
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RIM used a superheroes motif for the infographic, creating what it called "the Bold Team."
That led to hundreds of brand-bashing responses. "Let's #BeBold and make a super #GoGoGirl with magic spatula powers she can come up with a strategy to save herself before @Blackberry dies," wrote @Naweed Khan. "@blackberry You are boldly running your company into the ground #BeBold", said benihime33.
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RIM's spin, outlined in a blog post, is that #BeBold isn't a campaign per se, but a "bit of fun."
"As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organize the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign," reads the RIM blog post. RIM reps could not be reached for further comment.
RIM's attempt at a semantic fig leaf appeared to merely draw attention to the non-campaign. By Tuesday afternoon, most of the #BeBold comments on Twitter were about RIM's lack of marketing prowess, rather than users' takes on what it means to be bold.
David Berkowitz, vice president of emerging media at digital agency 360i, says brands with big vulnerabilities like RIM should avoid hashtag campaigns. "Hashtags are ripe for brandjacking, but some brands are more ripe for getting their hashtags jacked than others, Berkowitz says, adding that Apple and Virgin would be unlikely to suffer the same fate. "RIM is in a tailspin," says Berkowitz. "It's tough to do much with their marketing when their business is in transition, to put it mildly."
The hashtag itself was another problem. Says Berkowitz: "If Delta does a campaign to win a free flight and uses #flydeltafree, it won't be attacked in the same way as if it uses #whyilovedelta that invites sarcasm."
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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