The silly season of social media adoption - corporate use of...Snapchat?

I enjoy reading the Facebook page for the Condescending Corporate Brand Page, and this morning they came up with the ideal parody of brand me-tooism.

Proving that we're a proper ‎#cool brand at this social media lark...you can follow us on Twitter too!

Essentially it'll be a waste of time - because all we'll do is link all of the posts from this very ‎#Facebook page to tweet out, negating the need to actually follow it. Just to be even more annoying, all of the tweets will be cut off halfway through a sentence finishing with an 'fb.me' link because Facebook is completely different to ‎#Twitter. Naturally, our agency has not realised this of course! (please RT)

In the comments, I said that they hadn't gone far enough:

I'm sorry, but if you're not on Pinterest, you don't exist. Or better yet, get on that service that sends a message and immediately erases it - now that's a service that a brand can really adopt!

At the time I wrote this comment, I had forgotten the name of said service, which is understandable since I am not in the service's target market. But the service's name is Snapchat, and I began wondering to myself - has any social media expert seriously recommended that a business use Snapchat for promotional purposes? In my mind, use of Snapchat by a corporation would seem to be the stupidest move whatsoever, since normally corporations want consumers to RETAIN their marketing material.

So, naturally, a company HAS chosen to use Snapchat for promotional purposes. The social media experts at Martin-Wilbourn Partners linked to a story in Mashable about a promotion from a frozen yogurt chain called 16 Handles. (Yes, this oh-so-trendy Snapchat-using company has appropriated its name from a 60-plus year old ice cream company.)

Anyway, Mashable describes how 16 Handles used Snapchat in its promotion:

The program works like this: If you snap a pic of you or your friends at a 16Handles location tasting one of their flavors, you can send it to Love16Handles on Snapchat. In return, you'll get a coupon for anywhere from 16% to 100% off on your purchase. You have 10 seconds to let the cashier scan the coupon, though.

This promotion apparently occurred in January - and, to be fair, Mashable noted that this promotion was an experiment. From what I can tell, the experiment failed - I was unable to find any mention of the promotion today on 16 Handles' Facebook page. But it certainly created a buzz back in January, when community manager Adam Britten was asked about the success of the promotion.

One of our goals for this was exposure, so we are happy with the coverage this promo has received (in publications such as Ad Age and Mashable). As far as actual numbers go from the campaign, it’s harder to say, since this period is serving as a litmus test for us, only running at six of our stores.

So let's recap. 16 Handles runs a promotion in January using the current cool trendy service. All of the social media publications fall all over themselves talking about it, and social media experts begin recommending the use of Snapchat for corporation promotions. Meanwhile, the company that originally pulled the stunt has long since moved on, seeking the next buzz.

So obviously, someone at the State Department will decide that this is more cost-effective than their other promotional efforts.