Hasta La Creative!

Brands are making so many missteps on Twitter these days, one could fill an entire magazine with just these social media suicides. It’s not easy to balance your brand outreach on social media when Twitter has turned into a cage match to the death between opposing ideals. Add memes to the mix, and their level of “dankness” and ability to expire before they even trend and you’re bound to have a few flaming burnouts. Take this expert example from RC Cola, a cola brand that reached its pop-cultural apex in the 1980s, but still has fans. President Trump tweeted a late night typo, ‘Covfefe’, and literally minutes later the word trended, people printed T-shirts, brands made mock ads with it and it trended worldwide. RC Cola wanted in on that.

“We don’t have any plans of releasing a covfefe flavoured soda,” they tweeted, “If you want the taste of incompetence there are other colas more readily available.” The tweet was meant to poke fun at competitors but people were not amused, someone tweeted back “This is not a good marketing strategy.” and RC Cola mocked them with the mocking chicken Spongebob meme. Yes, the one that MIC.com says “is all that makes sense anymore in our broken country.”

Ten minutes later their branded verified Twitter account was suspended. Ouch.

Correction 20:30: Another ouch, I wasn’t paying attention to details here, and as Paul Arden always reminded us “the Devil is in the details. ” This was apparently not the official RC Cola account, but a parody mirroring the official accounts name and look, but making off-brand tweets. Got me. Just goes to show you that most people will fall for parody accounts at a first glance, and that little blue checkmark is pretty useless.

At this time we are working to actively pursue the deactivation of the fake account known as @OfficialRCCola with help from @Twitter.— Dr Pepper Snapple (@DrPepperSnapple) May 31, 2017