Langham Hotels recent foray into social media has ended after Hong Kong bloggers and Twitterers initiated heated discussions on the innapropriateness of the series of viral video’s that were “aimed at driving business to its hotels“.
Much has been written, and some background as well as the public’s thoughts on the campaign can be seen here, here, here, here, and here. Whilst it has obviously achieved the goals of a social media campaign in generating buzz, Langham’s response to pull the plug is an obvious sign that it did not go too well.
As marketers, irrelevant to whether on traditional, digital, or social mediums, a key component to a campaigns success is by really knowing our audience. This is really a basic marketing 101 concept that should not be forgotten in the hype of all the new platforms we can execute our tactics on.
To a certain extent, even on mass forms of traditional media, we have a general profile of our audience. For example TVB viewers vs AXN viewers, or Apple Daily readers vs SCMP readers. With the inherent boundless nature of social media, our content reaches further, and our audience becomes much broader. Messaging strategies must account for this.
In the end, whats done is done, and there will always be controversy where satirical humor is involved. When negative PR occurs, whether self inflicted or the result of certain events, smart and strategic reputation management is important. Pulling the plug to prevent further damage is one thing, but could Langham not have done a little better than just stating that they were dissapointed in the tone of the video’s being misunderstood?
