Social Media Crisis -- Use Your Content Carefully!!!

Choose your word carefully!!!

Nowadays, social media is a good tool for company or business to spread their message or promotion and interact with their customers. For marketing team, content is an important element to attract people's attention. Sometimes, content can be fun or humorous. Sometimes, it can be very serious. It doesn't matter what kind of style that marketing team uses to reach people attention. All they concern might focus on whether their word choices are causing offending to the reader or other people. It is very serious and dangerous to use inappropriate words in the content.

Big mistake for Adidas to choose inappropriately words

On April 18, 2017, few days after Boston Marathon, Adidas released a new promotion which subject line was "Congrats, you survived the Boston Marathon!" Maybe Adidas' marketing team thought that it was a great subject line for the runners who finished the Marathon; however, Adidas did not estimate the negative effects to the business. In 2013, Boston Marathon suffered a terrorist attack that more than 260 people injured from the attack. It was a bad memory for people who attended the event; however, Adidas used this sensitive words "Congrats, Survived the Boston Marathon" that many people felt angry about that and rejected to buy Adidas products again.



At the beginning, Adidas did not predict the situation like this. After realizing they make the big mistake, they apologized to runners and whole society at the first timing. Although not everyone forgave them, Adidas really did a good job at that time. It did calm down some people's anger.  It was a big lesson for Adidas to learn how to use social media well and how to avoid using sensitive words in its content.

How to prevent the sensitive content?

It is a big lesson for the marketers to learn how to prevent the sensitive words or content when they make a marketing plan. I think every marketing plan should be checked clearly before launched. Everyone has the responsibility to make the marketing plan appropriate and better. If the crisis happened, for my own perspective, PR people should highly responsible for dealing with the crisis because they are more professional and they have the knowledge to do it well. In this case, Adidas did a good job at the first timing, because it apologized quickly. Though Adidas did a good job, it cannot underestimate people's bottom line. If Adidas do that again, people may quit this brand forever.