MeinCoke and the Danger of Automated Campaigns
Coke the Latest Victim of User Generated Content Foiling Automated Social Media Marketing
It happened to the New England Patriots last November and now it has happened to Coca-Cola: an automated social media campaign designed to produce an engaging visual based on user generated action has turned into embarrassment.This comes as a surprise to absolutely no one. All it takes is one person to put a graffiti mustache on a portrait, and when you put your face out there in social media, there are millions of potential class clowns.
To show that Coca-Cola was synonymous with happiness, Coke invited users to tweet at them something that made them sad with the hashtag #makeithappy. Behind the scenes Coke had a program to make whimsical ASCII art with the text of the tweets.
Coca-Cola spokeswoman Lauren Thompson said the company "built and tested software and created incredibly extensive filters" to prevent unwanted content slipping through. It probably did catch a lot of base, explicit, and vulgar content. But people were certainly trying and clearly this content could be quite subtle. Witness what comedian Jim Norton did with it:
