Social media the Home Depot way

I’ve been following Richard the Cat on Twitter for a while. It’s the story of a family and their trials and tribulations with their yard as told by their cat.
The twitter feed (and Richard’s tumblr) are a product of the Home Depot marketing department. And it’s great. Richard has awesome comments on his humans and their struggle to create a happy yard. The tweets are low key and not overly home depot branded, but every Richard tweet I see, I think about the yard and things we might need from Home Depot.
And, of course, who on the internet doesn’t love a cat meme?
To my mind this is one of the better examples of brand social media. There is a theme. The tweets and tumblr does remind followers of the brand – Richard is an orange cat after all. The process is participatory, followers can upload cat photos on the Tumblr and tweet with Richard on Twitter.
Social media is social; a two way street. A lot of brands fail with the social part in that they treat it as a one way street. Home Depot doesn’t do that with Richard.

Confirmation is too hard…
Do you have an abuse@ address?

Related Posts

The challenge of integrated marketing

There are dozens of ways for companies to interact with customers these days. Business Insider recently posted this infographic, only to realize that they’d left off Pintrest.

Read More

Think before scheduling tweets

My twitter feeds exploded with discussion and comments and retweets about the explosions in Boston this afternoon. One of my friends even commented, “It’s days like today when you can tell who is scheduling tweets.”
If you are scheduling tweets it’s really important to have someone around to monitor local, national or international events and stop those tweets before your brand looks insensitive.

Read More

Social network spam

I’ve been seeing more and more social network spam recently, mostly on twitter. In some ways it’s even more annoying than email spam. Here I am, happily having a conversation with a friend and then some spammer sticks their nose in and tweets “myproduct will solve your problem!”
It’s happened twice in the last week.
In most recent example, I was asking my twitter network for some advice on pasta making. I’ve made pasta a few times, but it’s never been exactly right. Not having an Italian grandmother to ask, I was looking for someone with experience in pasta making to answer a few questions. I was having an ongoing conversation with a friend who was helping me troubleshoot my problems. He gave me his recipe to try to see if that would work better.  I thanked him profusely and replied that I would give it a try but probably not tomorrow because it was accounting day and those tend to run late. Someone replied to that tweet suggesting I try some random accounting software to make my accounting easier.
Just… No.
Interjecting product ads in a conversation may be the “acceptable” and “best practice” way to market through social networking. But, I can promise that you’re no better the guy who interrupts conversations at parties so he can hand out business cards for his affiliate program selling herbal male enhancement drugs.
Don’t be That Guy.
Update: Today’s twitter spam was from one of the email accreditation services attempting to sell me their email delivery services.

Read More