Marijuana-Smoking Elmo: the Netflix/Qwikster/Twitter Conundrum
Anyone who had a Netflix account over the summer of 2011 holds a distinctive, inert distrust for the company. Not only did they hike their prices that summer, but the Netflix also attempted to completely separate their DVD-by-mail services from their online streaming services. The new DVD spin-off business—now known as one of the biggest modern corporate missteps–was to be called Qwikster. By October 2011, the public outcry was so severe Netflix was forced kill Qwikster before it had even launched, opting to keep all of their features together under the same website. It was quite embarrassing for Netflix, and adding insult to injury that summer was the Qwikster /Twitter debacle.
Though Netflix jumped on attaining the Qwikster domain name (www.Quikster.com), it seems no one on the Qwikster team found it necessary to research if their name was already taken on Twitter. It was. @Qwikster was already an account, owned by one “Jason Castillo.” One can only imagine how the public relations department at Netflix reacted when discovering that not only could they not use @Quikster, but they were being unintentionally represented by one of the worst possible candidates.
The avatar for Jason Castillo’s @Quikster twitter account featured Elmo from Sesame Street smoking a joint. His badly-composed tweets usually featured drug references, profanity, and degrading comments about women. Some of the more colorful @Quikster tweets can be found here.
Since Qwikster (the Netflix service) never got completely off the ground, the company did not have to fully comment on or handle their twitter domain being owned and horribly misrepresented by someone else. However, during the summer of 2011 when Netflix was attempting to hype their new business direction, @Quikster gained more than 600 followers. Undoubtedly, many of these people believed the drug-using, womanizing Mr. Castillo to be a DVD mail-in amenity.
Moral of this blunder: always do thorough social media research on your brand. You never know who already may characterize your name.
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