Sometimes, dear interwebs, I despair of tea companies. Today my tea-company despair cannon’s two barrels are both firmly fixed at Twinings.
As I gazed out through the Twitterverse I spied the following tweet:
Free tea? Yes puuurlease http://bit.ly/6RuDyB – warning – it is mainly fruit/’erbal teas. Sigh. (Tweeted by @HJonesy)
I duly clicked on the link and ended up at the Twinings free tea bag page. I filled in my details and then, *then* dear reader, I was invited to let the lovely Twinings people know how I heard about their generous free tea offer. Buoyed with excitement I got ready to tick the box that said “Twitter”. Sadly I was instead met with the following options:
TV advertising
From a friend
Search engine
Twinings tea-mail
Rage. Visceral, chair throwing, sweary rage. Ok, I just raised my eyebrows heavenwards. But seriously, how foolish of Twinings! Such a free tea stunt is utterly bound for virality. Free stuff is classic Twitter-bait and the good folks at Twinings – so high on camomile – utterly overlooked virality. To not acknowledge the – I imagine – sizeable volume of traffic that will inevitably be generated through the social web, Twinings looked to have dropped the ball.
Oh well, s’not my problem!
P.S. I ended up ticking “From a friend”
Seems like their UK marketing dept has missed out on the whole SM aspect entirely, not just on this occasion. Silly with such a Twitter-friendly name! Weekly promotional e-mails is about the extent of it, very old-school.
Wow… Twinings fail.
Just shows how social media is still off some big companies’ radar.