Saturday, December 7, 2013

SpaghettiOs? "Uh oh"...

[UPDATE: SPAGHETTIOS WITHDREW THE TWEET AND APOLOGIZED SATURDAY AT 11:32 AM EASTERN TIME: "We apologize for our recent tweet in remembrance of Pearl Harbor Day. We meant to pay respect, not to offend."]

When you are the social media manager for a retail brand, you want to make sure that your brand gets a lot of attention.

If your brand's tweet gets over 4,000 retweets and over 2.000 favorites in an 11 hour period, that's success, right?

If your brand's tweet is mentioned on Facebook and Adland (and numerous other places), that's success, right?

Maybe not.

First, here's the tweet - still up 11 hours after its first posting - that is meriting all of this attention.


Yes - on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, SpaghettiOs has chosen to mark the occasion with a silly cartoon image. And, as Adland noted, the social media team apparently posted the tweet and then went home for the weekend, missing the brewing backlash.

To top it off, the Campbell Soup Company is one of those firms that has decided to scrap its own websites in favor of brand pages on other websites. So the official SpaghettiOs site is its Facebook page - and the comments are rolling in. Here's one.

2,402 Americans were killed in the Pearl Harbor attacks. Yea...let's remember and celebrate with some SpaghettiOs. What?? #TwitterFail #Mystified

And when you remember that Campbell's originally introduced SpaghettiOs under its Franco-American brand - and that France was one of several countries devastated by World War II - the irony is...well, it's not delicious.

Fortunately, SpaghettiOs creator Donald Goerke did not live to see this "uh oh."
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