If you’re in the UK and you use the internet then you heard about it, simple as that. But just in case we have some international followers or someone who had a bit of mid-week social media detox, we’ll recap.
On Wednesday, s**t hit the fan among two of England’s highest profile WAGs. It all kicked off when Colleen Rooney, wife of Wayne Rooney (who now is the striking partner of Norwegian forward Ola Kamara at DC United), spilled some beans on Instagram in sensational fashion.
She wrote: “For a few years now someone who I trusted to follow me on my personal Instagram account has been consistently informing The Sun newspaper of my private posts and stories.
“There has been so much information given to them about me, my friends and my family – all without my permission or knowledge.
“After a long time of trying to figure out who it could be, for various reasons, I had a suspicion.
“To try and prove this, I came up with an idea, I blocked everyone from viewing Instagram except ONE account. (Those on my private account must have been wondering why I haven’t had stories on there for a while).
“Over the past five months I have posted a series of false stories to see if they made their way into the Sun newspaper. And you know what, they did! The story about gender selection in Mexico, the story about returning to TV and then the latest story about the basement flood in my new house.
“It’s been tough keeping it to myself and not making any comment at all, especially when the stories have been leaked, however I had to. Now I know for certain which account/individual it’s come from.
“I have saved and screenshotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.
“It’s……… Rebekah Vardy’s account.”
The news spread like a house fire…which then turned into an inferno. National newspapers started spreading the news and soon everyone on social media knew.
But unlike most stories like this, it didn’t die down after an hour or so. It kept gathering momentum throughout the day and it became unavoidable.
Rebekah Vardy responded by denying, other footballers and WAGs got involved and according to Social Chain Data, the spat had TRIPLE the amount of Twitter mentions (276,822) as Boris Johnson (80,074).
Now with great traction, comes great opportunity. Reactive social marketing can be brilliant, and two major brands showed perfect examples of how light humour can be used to generate great hits even when the topic is completely unrelated.
Netflix was quick to jump on it and Tweeted: “we’re going to have to make a documentary about this, aren’t we?”
The tweet got 34.4k likes, compared to their usual 100-1000 – proving just how good the move was.
Innocent is another brand that was quick to react. Their marketing these days is mostly about their new blue drink, so they saw the opportunity and curled the ball into the top corner with this post:
Great work by both companies who clearly aren’t scared of using humour in their social media campaigns.