Don't talk across me - The convention of Social Conversation

When questions about the validity of the Iranian Election voting hit the Twitter universe, people both inside Iran and around the world used keywords to enable the conversations and the information to be easily found on Twitter.  It was a massive conversation with hundreds of thousands - even millions talking part. Habitat, a UK retailer of household goods and furniture, chose to take advantage of the opportunity to utilise keywords, known as hashtags, on Twitter to get its sales message appearing when twitter users searched for information about the Iranian election. Many Twitter users felt that it was an inappropriate use of a difficult situation for commercial self-promotion.  In today’s Societal Web world, self-promotion and overt sales techniques quickly annoy and upset the audience which runs across them.  Very quickly their approach was criticised and Habitat realised their error.  Since taking this action, Habitat have removed the entries made on Twitter and apologised for the action - they were right to do so.  It’s a great learning for all retailers, in fact all businesses, that the Societal Web does not provide opportunities to talk across existing conversations but great opportunities to engage with them. Just as in face-to-face communications, conversations which are interrupted by others with their own agenda don’t get much attention from the original participants of the conversation.  The same is true online, the same rules apply, and the brand damage done by ignoring those conventions can be significant.