go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

People Are Relentlessly Mocking Shell Over Greenpeace’s Social Media Take Down*

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-relentlessly-mocking-shell-over-this-massive-social-media-fail-2012-6

UPDATE: Greenpeace did such a good job with this social media campaign—prompting people to create their own memes about Shell drilling in the Arctic—that they had us fooled. If it’s any consolation, at least we weren’t the only advertising site to be tricked.

Check out the hilarious memes users have made mocking shells new campaign.

Here are the memes>

ORIGINAL POST: In one of the worst examples of marketer-prompted crowdsourcing gone wrong, Shell has asked the people of the internet to create their own meme about the oil company (featuring cute, soon-to-be-endangered or extinct animals of the Arctic).

Obama recently “granted Shell unrivaled access to drill the vast snowy wastes of the North” (yes, it really says that) and the oil company is super “pumped” to have people express how excited they are about the project to, you know, “free much-needed Arctic resources.”

 In perhaps the most predictable move of all time, thousands of people have created “ads” (featuring Shell’s “Let’s Go” slogan) that tear the company to shreds over its impact on global warming and wildlife. It ranges from absolutely hilarious to completely nasty. Virtually no one took Shell’s lead in creating heartwarming, “thanks for saving the day!” copy.

“But why?” some naive Shell social media manager is surely asking as he packs up his desk. Well, wanna know the kind of people who love snarky memes? The kind of people who don’t love Shell. Shell, meet the internet.

Remember the time McDonald’s had the horrible idea to have people tweet their experiences at McDonald’s under the #McDStories hashtag only to be inundated with graphic tales of food poisoning or how the stench of Type 2 Diabetes wafts through the restaurant? This is debatably worse.

We would have asked Shell to comment, but it hadn’t set up the voicemail of its media contact number at the time of publication. Oy.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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