Hi Richard,

You never know if it was planned that way and they calculated that the 'bad publicity' they receive was worth it for the exposure (double exposure - via the tweets and also via the buzz - IE your post here).

If you think about it, how strong is the suggestion in your mind that they really don't understand online marketing? It's not so much online marketing that they don't understand, but more that they marketed too hard, in a 'spammy' manner.

Conversely, does the occurrence surreptitiously implant the idea that they are a progressive, previously purely offline company that are now tapping into online methods - hence, they are 'with the times'?

When I first spotted the messages, I thought it was just a spammer pretending to be Habitat in order to push a gift card (if you ever look at spam mail, you'll find this is a fairly popular trend), and so I dismissed it.

Clearly I was wrong!

Seriously - how stupid can people / companies get? Using keywords to do with Iran to push Habitat's products? Even from a marketing perspective, it's a wasted effort, because people are hardly going to read about Iran and then think "oh, I'll just pop along to Habitat and buy some furniture"! Marketers know untargeted promotions aren't going to be as effective.

I think the strangest thing is that people
follow Habitat on twitter.

Crazy.

^^^^^ Haha, just what I was thinking!

GoGetta

I think sites like Twitter and Facebook present too big a temptation for advertising due to the shear size of their membership. As said, I wouldn't see this episode as bad publicity. I'm not likely going to boycott Habitat now I've heard this - not that I go there anyway.