26 Aug, 2009
Lloyds Pharmacy fail – why giving Twitter to interns is a bad idea
Posted by: Pez In: social-media
Just a quick one here while I think about it. I’ve recently noticed there’s a new kid on the corporate Twitter block, and they’re not learning from the mistakes Habitat made earlier this year.
Lloyds Pharmacy (who have two locations on my High Street alone) have recently set up on Twitter and, judging by the spiel on their website, they’re keen on primary care and offering health services (sometimes for free) to local communities. They’ve been using Twitter, therefore, to spread health messages as well as plug their own brand.
However, they’re doing this wrong. Instead of promoting their presence on Twitter, following a few people here and there and building up a natural following, they’re going with the scattergun approach, automatically sending out a tweet like this every time someone, whether they’re following or not, mentions the word ‘holiday’:
Obviously a lot of users are annoyed by this, it’s intrusive and spammy and certainly goes against the whole community-based, fluffy image that Lloyds tries to portray – I sent them a tweet to this effect, but obviously they’re not listening (again, a major no no in the world of corporate twittering). This just shows a major lack of research, making it seem like someone’s heard about Twitter and gone out on their own, without doing any research into what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable – very much like what happened with Habitat’s ‘intern’, who used trending topics to try and get Habitat’s tweets visible in Twitter’s search.
I’m all for learning, and I’d like to think Lloyds will realise what they’re doing is wrong, and go back to the drawing board, trying to understand more about what is and what isn’t acceptable on Twitter, but I’m not holding out any hope.
