Hello everybody!

So as you may know, Earth Hour is happening in about 2 hours time (8:30pm to 9:30pm SG). Well to be frank, I did not know Earth Hour was happening today until yesterday only! How did I find out? On Social Media.

The above post appeared on my Twitter. I saw the hashtag #EarthHour, and afterwards went onto Google to confirm that it is really happening soon. I did not even follow Coca-Cola Singapore on Twitter, but it still appears on my homepage because it was a ‘promoted’ post (as seen at the bottom left of the picture). This shows that marketing on Social Media has a huge potential outreach (you can even reach out to people who do not follow you).

But it got me thinking, what does Coca-Cola got to do with EarthHour? Probably nothing at all! Looking at their post, they are probably just jumping on the bandwagon of the event to promote their brand. I clicked the hashtag, and there are so many tweets with #EarthHour!! Some of the posts are totally unrelated!!

What does EarthHour have to do with accidents and fighting (and the link to an article talks nothing about EarthHour as well)?? But even though it is not related, an user (like me) who was searching about EarthHour came across their post, and even clicked on it. The post got more awareness just because it hashtag something that is popular at the moment.

I want to ask what are your view on this. Do you think that companies (or anyone) who jump on the bandwagon on an unrelated event are doing the right thing or actually it may bring about negative effects to their social media marketing efforts?

Thank you for reading!

Jeremy Pek (G2)