As of Tuesday, Jell-O officially declared an end to its latest social media campaign on Twitter, built around the complaint-filled hashtag #FML. (That acronym, for those who aren't familiar, can be found on UrbanDictionary.com. We'll let it do the explaining.) In short, #FML is as a hashtagged expression from Twitter users who are having bad days. Jell-O attempted to shine a little light on the hashtag users' lives, however, by rebranding the #FML hashtag as "Fun My Life"—and offering free Jell-O samples to hashtag users via public responses.
Here's an example:
@angel_marengo you're right. You want someone to Fun your Life? Luckily, we're here. http://t.co/qDlDfDNMIA Exp. 48hrs
— JELL-O (@JELLO) May 23, 2013
Get the gist of it?
Of course, the campaign also resulted in commentary from tweeters who accused Jell-O of not understanding what they were doing. And many of the complaints that Jell-O's Twitter account responded to were trivial, complaining about movie choices or getting nails done. But some of the tweets that Jell-O replied to were extremely cryptic. Take this one, for instance:
Wait. Did you guys see that Jello promoted tweet asking for #FML tweets? They want it to mean FUN My Life. Are they new to the internet?
— Kate McKean (@kate_mckean) June 17, 2013
Of course, the opposite was actually true. Jell-O absolutely knew what they were doing. The spirit of the campaign seemed to that of turning emotional lemons into lemonade, calling out to young, troubled strangers and making them aware of a brand that their parents grew up with.
Ugh how did I know this was gonna happen #fml
— Kendra Cook (@danceluvr27) June 14, 2013
Ambiguous statements or lone emoticons and hashtags without context could easily be about serious life topics such as death or personal issues. Then again, the original tweeters are putting their feelings on display in public to begin with.
Jell-O launched this campaign taking on a certain amount of risk. One errant response could have easily triggered a backlash, but if you look at the complete list of #FML replies right now, the results seem to be overwhelmingly non-confrontational—even positive!
So barring any new revelations, this campaign may have turned out to be a win after all. What do you think?
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