Alissa Widman's Journalism 4950 Blog

When initiating a viral social media campaign, companies should never ignore the concerns of the audience they’re trying to reach.

They also should never send a spam tweet that could be considered offensive to a marketing expert with a well-established Internet presence.

Ragú, a popular spaghetti sauce brand owned by food giant Unilever, unfortunately did both last year when attempting to launch a Twitter marketing campaign with a video of mom bloggers criticizing their husbands’ poor cooking habits. The two-minute video — which is, admittedly, rather boring and condascendingly sexist — was sent via spam messages from Ragú’s Twitter account to a few dads with an Internet presence.

Ragú’s solution for dads who can’t cook? Use their sauce — it makes cooking easier for the seemingly incompetent male population. The brand’s social media managers most likely thought dads would find the campaign amusing, blog or tweet a response to the mom bloggers, and then spread the message.

Responses from dads, however, were anything but amused. Many criticized Ragú’s video for implying men are incapable of cooking (and, likewise, that women are more apt to do housework-type activities like cooking, circa 1950s). A prominent blogger, author and online marketing expert, C.C. Chapman, received the tweet and immediately took to his blog to criticize its poor taste with a post entitled “Ragú hates dads.” Soon after, he kindly offered the company advice on how to improve its strategies for the future. But he also vowed he would never consider buying Ragú.

Chapman wrote a few follow-up blog posts and it took Ragú almost 24 hours respond. Finally, the brand contacted Chapman and later posted a generalized response that still didn’t leave Chapman or other dad bloggers satisfied. You can read it here.

As Chapman said in his blog posts, I think whoever planned Ragú’s Twitter campaign was severely unaware of how to successfully engage an audience with social media. The campaign touched on a sensitive subject in a discriminatory manner that could be offensive to some people. Ragú sent the message to several dads in an impersonal way, and when they responded negatively, Ragú took too look to reply — and even when it did, there was no real person to interact with, just someone hidden behind the persona of a jar of sauce.

Social media should be a two-way conversation between a company and its consumers. When Ragú’s Twitter campaign went awry, it went silent. It was a poor marketing strategy that left the brand more damaged than when it had started.

I don’t think Ragú really “hates dads” — but it certainly doesn’t know how to interact with them on social media.