MeinCoke and the Danger of Automated Campaigns

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:

I need to hop in the shower, but my crying wife and those damn paramedics won't get the hell out of my way. #MakeItHappy, #Nationwide

— Jim Norton (@JimNorton) February 2, 2015

Profanity filters are one thing. Tangential references to violence are harder.

As is recognizing hate speech, and that is where Gawker comes into play. They tweeted out white supremacist hate speech, noticed that Coke picked up on it and re-tweeted it, and the race was on. Enter @MeinCoke, an account designed to tweet passages from "Mein Kampf" at the Coek account with the hashtag.

Automated social media, meet automated trolling.

It worked. All too well. Coke took down the campaign once word was out that they had been duped.

As a public service reminder, here once again are rules to live by for automating social media.

No-Nos of Social Media Automation

1. No Scheduled Posts of Variable Content - if you schedule it, know exactly what it will be ahead of time. 
2. No Automated Inclusion of User Generated Content - otherwise @MeinCoke happens
3. No Automated Posts Based on User Controlled Event Triggers - this is what tripped up the Patriots. Automate a notification to your team instead. Let them verify the event and then post manually. Midnight of the New Year? Sure. Your 100th day in business? Yes. Your 1,000,000th follower? Check to see who it is.

I get what Coca-Cola was trying to do. It is engaging, almost magical, for users to get back that ASCII art from their text. But you can give them that instant experience without the danger of broadcasting through your official channel. Build a landing page for them and let them run wild. But anything through the official voice has to be vetted.
And not by automation.