Promoting Twitter users who talk about your brand or who work for your company makes great sense. Partnering with other heavily-followed Twitter types not only helps you find an echo for your Twitter marketing messages, but also helps you find new followers in the process. This being said, we’ve got to pick our Twitter alliances very carefully. A mega-brand like Nickelodeon should really know this — and yet the children’s network finds itself in the center of a Twitter tornado thanks to its promoting actor Jason Biggs.
Nickelodeon promotes lots of Twitter accounts belonging to the stars of their family-friendly shows. So Biggs, star of the raunchy American Pie movie series, was added to the list of promoted accounts for his participation in the channel’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Biggs, who provides the voice of Leo for the reboot of the ’80s cartoon, had his account actively promoted by Nickelodeon’s TMNT page.
The problem? Biggs’ tweets aren’t exactly family-friendly. The actor allegedly sent out several graphic and very sexually charged tweets about Mitt Romney’s and Paul Ryan’s wives. The now-deleted and very NSFW tweets can be found here but we’re sure you get where this is going. Parents were, naturally, ticked off and flooded Nickelodeon with angry tweets and emails. Many demanded that sponsors like Kellogg’s and Kraft pull their advertising from the network.
The big question is, how could this ugliness been avoided? True, Biggs and his people should have had a long talk about cleaning up the content of his tweets long before any of this went down. But Nickelodeon is really to blame here. Tweets, like it or not, are a snap judgment of us and our brands. Reading through Biggs’ tweets, anybody can tell this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you want the kiddos reading. Nick owes it to its young audiences to do a little research before promoting partnerships.
Neither camp has yet to respond, but we’re hoping this is a growth opportunity for all parties involved. Biggs needs to learn a little restraint before he blows his comeback, while Nick could practice some skillful un-following. Readers, what would you do? Tell us in the comments section!
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