In this blog post on the Harvard Business Review, it explores the pitfalls of a company using social media.

The example Qantas, the Australian Airline company, who had a twitter promotion in which people were to tweet about their dream vacation, but backfired and had people tweeting about the CEO’s huge pay raise and the lack of employee pay raise and how it was labelled as greedy.

In my opinion, this is not bad marketing as despite the situation being negative, it has caught the attention of the media and it will provide free publicity for Qantas and it allows the customer to feel more involved and in the know about what is happening with the companies they are interested in.

As in my previous blog post, I stand by my opinion that it need’s to be handled properly with a specific purpose and a narrowly specified target market or else it will reach the wrong markets, prove ineffective and waste money.

I agree with the blog to “stop treating social media as marketing” and that it should be used more for customer relations, unless the product your are promoting is ideal for marketing through social media.