June 13th, 2009
Guest Post: Social Media Analysis for the Brave New Film’s Stop Starbucks Campaign
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!
(This guest post is written by Freddie Benjamin (Twitter).)
On May 20, 2009 Brave New Films (BNF) – the media firm behind Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price – stretched the limits of digital activism as it declared war on Starbucks. Its battle cry: “Twitter bombs away!”
Twitter turned into a battleground when media campaigns from BNF and Starbucks collided on the same day. Brave New Film’s newest project “Stop Starbucks” is aimed at raising awareness of Starbucks’ anti-union position and its murky past in dealing with union employees. It was a co-incidence that its YouTube launch coincided with Starbucks’ ad campaign asking people to take pictures of Starbucks posters in six major cities across the US and post them on Twitter. The very next day a post on Brave New Film’s blog urged people to take pictures of themselves in front of a Starbucks holding signs protesting Starbucks’ anti-union stance and to post them to twitter – and hence started an ‘anti-campaign’. The stand-out feature that turned this affair into a twitter-war was BNF urging people to use the same hashtags (#top3percent and #starbucks) that Starbucks had decided upon for its promotional campaign.
