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Tuesday, 10 March 2015

Penguin books #YourMum twitter backlash!

We all love a good Twitter highjacking story! However, this time the brand highjacked is a little surprising... Penguin Books- the publishing company we all remember from childhood, attempted to get #YourMum trending on twitter based on books their mum would like to receive for Mothers' Day.

In principal, it's a pretty simple campaign with not much potential and is almost a bit dull and samey...however, the campaign took an interesting twist...
We all remember Your Mama jokes from the playground... and it seemed the Twitter community found it hilarious to relive their youth and tweet Penguin with endless jokes, totally hijacking Penguin's lovely intentions with crude jokes.
 
And then more brands jumped on the bandwagon!



 However, despite the totally highjacking of the campaign- I actually believe Penguin did a great job and spread much faster than had the campaign not gone viral- even if the reason behind doing so wasn't their original intention. Everyone was talking about Penguin and it got the Twitter community talking about literature- a great result for Penguin in my opinion!
 

 Penguin handled their response to the highjacking excellently, remaining calm, professional and taking it lightheartedly, which actually made some question whether that was their intention all along! I don't believe Penguin could have predicted that reaction, nor could anyone else. However, it is a lesson to brands in the future who need to be extremely careful when selecting hashtags and content which has the potential to go viral for the wrong reasons.
 
I think overall the campaign was great PR for the brand and has shown their personality slightly more than I have ever seen!
 
Steph


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