Thursday, October 1, 2009

Why Twitter is dangerous for brands...

When you brand is claimed by someone other than you.

Well, that is what I imagine has happened, because if Kraft is running the iSnack2.0 Twitter account, I think they need to take another look at the messages they are putting out there. (You might need to click on the pics to look at them properly and see what they are saying.)
So why do I think that this is not Kraft running this account? If you can't be bothered reading through these, there are posts which contain delicious quotes such as:
I have posted before about how people/company's use Twitter and how aware they should be re. who is following and therefore what they are saying. I can't imagine that any smart corporate company would be happy about how they are being represented in this Twitter feed. If this really is Kraft approved, I would be amazed, and I think they need to think again about who their target market is. You're aiming too young with your sense of humour. Mother's are not going to find the "Dab a little of me under your kids arms each morning to ward off pedophiles." tweet terribly amusing.

I'll give whoever is running this some credit, they have done a smart thing. Picking up a brand which is getting a fair amount of media attention at the moment, I would think that they could sell this to Kraft for a pretty penny if they wanted to. All 800+ followers included.

For anyone else, consider yourself warned, even if you are not going to use it right now, claiming your brand's Twitter user name is as important as securing a URL these days!

2 comments:

Mark Lincoln said...

That's true for www.isnack2.com - clearly not owned by Kraft! There's always been a wealth of people out there ready to snap up domain names, and as you said, now the trend has transferred to Twitter accounts.

Twitter staff did run an operation to verify and take down fakes accounts for celebrities. I think there is actually a law against impersonating someone else so Twitter was within its rights to take them down. They still haven't caught www.twitter.com/darthvader tho ... unless that's the REAL Darth Vader of course!

Incidentally, Facebook accounts will be next. Now that they have support for usernames (Our company account is www.facebook.com/hotpj)

Unknown said...

I don't know that this supports the assertion that Twitter is inherently dangerous so much as the idea that internet illiteracy is dangerous for a brand. As Mark Lincoln touched upon above, domain name squatting was quite lucrative even a decade ago. Certainly getting a Twitter account is technically different from getting a domain name, but the essential concept is the same: protect yourself from people pretending to be you.