Let's Talk Viral Social Media Moments!

The Black Dog Pub in London went viral after being mentioned in Taylor Swift’s latest album (side note, are you all fans of the album???), leading to a surge in visitors and requiring extra resources. This highlights the power of unexpected virality and the importance of being prepared.

We also have a customer, Yuma Regional Medical Center, who shared a story about a teddy bear that lost it’s owner and the sweet little boy was reunited with the bear after the Yuma team was able to take him on a few “adventures” around the hospital campus to show the boy what the bear had been up to (video here)

We want to hear from you! Have you experienced a viral moment with your brand? What did you do, and what happened? It doesn’t have to be one of these “big” stories, it can be something smaller like an insight from a review or survey submission and how that made it’s way across your internal org.

Share your stories with us :smile:

I’ve had two, both at the same company - occurring over a decade ago, in my first digital marketing job. I’ll cover one for now and if enough people respond to this thread, I’ll share my other one. :slight_smile:

Christmas - Cancelled!

Basic premise:
I was fortunate to join Hotels4u, a subsidiary brand (at the time) of the original Thomas Cook UK travel company. Hotels4u was a small hotel-only booking website for customers to find and secure rooms at hotels around the world as part of the then growing trend to book each part of a holiday individually, rather than paying for package breaks (hotels & flights). While it was owned by the bigger company, Hotels4u wasn’t that well known and was run fairly independently.

The CEO of the company, which was for UK customers only, challenged our (small) digital marketing team to drum up interest & bookings over the Christmas period. We had a brainstorm and proposed a campaign to run for 24-hours on Christmas Day offering £50 off any booking over a specific amount, for UK customers only with it being capped at 1 booking per customer. The promotion would run from 00:01 UK to 23:59 UK.

Great idea in principle but the execution didn’t go to plan. We promoted the offer a day before Christmas via various channels - email, social, our website etc.

What happened?
The promotion went viral… but not for the right reasons!

Unfortunately, technical restrictions put in place didn’t actually work. So, the Head of Digital Marketing woke up on Christmas Day (around 05:00 as he had kids) to a shock - there had been tens of thousands of bookings from the far-East!

Those individuals had taken advantage of the technical limitations to book 7 and 14 night holidays but done as 1 night stays, 7 days in a row… and as the per night cost was less than £50, they were essentially getting free holidays!

So, the Head of, turned off the promotion before the UK market woke up, and naturally, when the UK market woke up and went to check out the promotion, they were disappointed to find the promotion wasn’t working. Thus, they took their anger and disappointed to social media.

I was managing our accounts and hadn’t (at the time) known the promotion had been turned off so early in the day. So, I woke up and saw our social media pages flooded with complaints - and I mean, FLOODED. Up until then, we may have received the odd complaint per week but this was in the hundreds. I started to respond, trying to manage the situation until I got through to the Head of, who explained what had happened.

We were able to cancel a lot of the bad bookings due to having T&C’s in place, but it still cost us a lot of money. And, a lot of staff not in customer service, were pulled in to help cancel bookings and email customers who couldn’t use the promotion to either explain why, or, for those who were legitimate, offer an apology.

Why did it happen?

  • No technical limits were put in to stop people from outside of the UK booking.
  • No limits were put in to ensure the time period (00:01 - 23:59) only applied to the UK.
  • Lack of time meant we rushed the set-up without thorough testing of different scenarios.
  • Promotion took place when staff were on personal leave so resourcing was limited.

What did we learn?

  • Never launch a campaign on a Friday or ahead of time off for key staff e.g., Christmas.
  • Ensure thorough testing has taken place, especially if it’s technical.
  • Cover your backs with legally-binding terms & conditions to protect your company.
  • Unfortunately, there are bad actors out there who’ll take advantage.

What did our CEO say?
While it wasn’t an ideal situation, we did get a spike in traffic to the website. No news is good news? He jokingly asked us to drive that much demand in the next Christmas period, but with the right processes in place this time…

Read more:
https://www.asa.org.uk/news/deck-the-halls-with-compliant-advertising.html


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O M G @adam I’m sure waking up to that influx of notifications was crazy. My stomach dropped just reading this thinking about what was going through you & your team’s heads on how to fix it. Definitely some lessons learned and probably equipped you for future crisis PR scenarios :sweat_smile:

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Thank you for sharing the honest truth about the details of what went wrong. It is a good lesson for all Marketing departments, I am glad to see that things like this happen in all industries. Quick thinking and action taken by the Head of to have turned off the special, as quickly as possible, to minimize the damage. Like one of our executives always says when a campaign goes contrary to planned, there is always a lesson to be learned, there are no wasted resources, and no failures, only lessons learned, if we can focus on the lesson, and not just on the mistake.

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Thank you for sharing your stories. I am new to this role and welcome all problem-solving strategies.

We’re a car dealership, so sadly, nothing we post really goes viral. It was very interesting reading comments from companies that do go viral, however. Thanks for sharing.

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We haven’t had a viral moment yet but instagram is having some super interesting trends right now. My favorite to follow is Hawaiian Host Group. Their boss promised to take them to Disney if they hit 10k and they ended up hitting 370k in the matter of DAYS!!!

The idea of going viral is still so wild to me! Keeping my fingers crossed that our teams get creative in the hopes of getting those views and clicks!

What I really love about this conversation is that it is such a good reminder to get your brand/reviews/basics in order BEFORE you go viral, so that you can manage it as best as possible.

Viral is scary because it can go either way.

So interesting, thanks for sharing!

It just goes to show how important influencer marketing can be!

So interesting, thanks for sharing!