FemFresh understanding of social media questioned following Facebook debacle
Hygiene brand FemFresh, which has suffered a huge Facebook backlash following its latest advert, ‘hasn't understood’ what social media is about, says social media consultancy We Are Social, after the brand suspended its page and deleted all its posts and comments.
Tarryn Blackwood, senior account manager at We Are Social, said: “It's clear that Femfresh hasn't understood or embraced what social is all about. They managed to undo a whole year’s work of community building and management just because people didn't have nice things to say about them. Not only did they swiftly dump their social agency in a transparent attempt to pass the buck, they also proceeded to run crying to Facebook for help in making the bullies go away.
“Femfresh’s biggest mistake was to keep quiet, rather than making the decision to either stand by their campaign, or pulling it because of the public backlash. Mistakes do happen, but social fails usually flare brightly and fizzle quickly – for example, the Kit Kat palm oil scandal last year, the page is still going strong, and it's currently activist free. However, all Femfresh’s actions have guaranteed them is a further extended period of bad publicity.
“Femfresh’s attempt to sweep the issues under the carpet by deleting comments and suspending its page means that when they decide to use the page again, the issues causing anger in the first place will still be there. And so will the negative comments."
Hundreds of comments mocking the hygiene brand’s latest ad, which used different euphemisms for the word ‘vagina’, had been posted on the page over the past fortnight.
Following the complaints, the brand has originally written on its wall: “Just a short note to tell all recent posters that we have seen your comments and we will be getting back to you.
“Whilst we welcome debate, please can we ask that you don’t post anything abusive or use bad language as this contravenes our policies and we will have to delete the posts. Thank you.”
The page then went down last week, with no updates being made since.
A statement in the ‘about’ section reads ‘This page is suspended until further notice. It has come to our attention that fake femfresh pages have been created and we would like to assure everyone that this has absolutely no affiliation with femfresh’ and adds that no comments written will be published.
Having already blocked the page so it could only be seen by people in the UK, is the finding of fake pages coming at an incredibly convenient time for the brand, and is that enough reason to delete all posts and comments?
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