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EConsultancy Blogs about @KennethCole hijacking hashtag, then promotes it

I noticed this earlier.  If you’ve been on Twitter within the last 24 hours, you have probably seen the backlash over @KennethCole’s insensitive tweet about Egypt.  KC has since deleted the tweet and apologized, so the backlash has died down considerably.

Econsultancy, like many social media sites and bloggers, also wrote  a post on the episode.  But what’s interesting to me is that EConsultancy is now promoting their post and have purchased the #KennethCole hashtag to promote their post, as you can see above.  The same hashtag that people are using to voice their displeasure over KC’s tweet from yesterday.  What that means is if you are following the #KennethCole hashtag on a client like TweetDeck, or if you search for it via Twitter Search, the promoted tweet from Econsultancy will always stay at the top of the results.

So it seems that Econsultancy is doing the exact same thing that KC did, they are attempting to leverage a hashtag for their own personal gain.

My question to you is, do you think Econsultancy is wrong to do this, or brilliant?

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About Mack Collier

My name is Mack Collier and I am a digital marketing and content strategist located in Alabama. Since 2006 I've helped companies of all sizes from startups to global brands such as Adobe, Dell and Ingersoll-Rand, create customer-centric programs, content and experiences. A long-time internet geek, I've been online since 1988 and began using social networking sites in 1991 when I joined Prodigy. Today, I help companies understand how new technologies like web3, crypto and artificial intelligence can integrate with existing marketing strategies to lead to exceptional customer experiences.

Comments

    • Mack Collier says

      Catherine I think this is an interesting question and also an interesting debate about how we view big brands vs individuals and sites. Another layer to this are the tweets from @KennethColePR, the fake account that someone created yesterday (I think) to mock KC over this mess. Some of their tweets are in such poor taste that they are unforgivable, but I haven’t seen anyone slamming them, while much more vitrol is being served up for KC.

      I think it’s very interesting to see what people are reacting to, how they are reacting, and who the source is.

  2. Chris Lake says

    Hey Mack,

    I think you’re right to call us out on this, though promoting an advice-based blog post is – I hope – a long way removed from jumping on the free #Cairo hashtag stream to sell shoes.

    People searching for ‘Kenneth Cole’, which I assume is the term we have bid on, are doing so because there is some bad noise. They want to know what’s going on, and our post helps explain that, and hopefully offers up a few ideas on how to prevent readers from doing something similar.

    In the headline of the post I purposefully didn’t use any words relating to Egypt, for fear of making the same kind of mistake that Cole made. I also didn’t promote anything in the post (we usually have a ‘Learn More’ pod at the foot of a blog post, with links to reports and training courses).

    It is standard practice to push the latest blog content as part of our experiment with the Twitter Promoted Products beta, though in hindsight I think we should have swerved on this one. We try to raise awareness of good practice, nothing more, so obviously I’m horrified at the thought that this could be interpreted as a step over the line.

    As such I’ve asked for us to stop pushing that post on Twitter, though it does raise another point: should I – and hundreds of other journalists – have avoiding writing about this in the first place? Should we not have promoted the story in our organic Twitter stream? We have to flag up worst practice to uncover and highlight best practice, and doing that can sometimes leave an unpleasant taste, or can push you into areas that you’d rather not get into.

    At any rate, thanks for the post. Food for thought at this end.

    Cheers,

    c.

    • Mack Collier says

      Chris thanks for chiming in. Even if Econsultancy was at its core trying to do the same thing KC was (leverage the conversation around a hashtag for personal gain), I will agree that what Econsultancy didn’t isn’t in the same realm as the original KC tweet.

      But I think given the content being promoted (a post about why KC was wrong to leverage a hashtag for personal gain), it could be seen as a bit of a disconnect to employ the same methods you spoke out against in the article?

      I do appreciate you replying here, and as you said, there’s some necessary experimentation that needs to be done with Promoted Tweets. I do applaud you for that, that’s how we all learn.

  3. Keith says

    Poor taste but probably achieving their desired result. I wouldn’t have done it. Better to err on the side of being blameless