RIM's BeBold campaign -- hashtag fail or genius marketing?

Yet another company has fallen foul of the Twitter hashtag. This time it's RIM with its BeBold campaign. But were the marketing team naive  -- or preparing our focus for the BlackBerry 10?

Last week RIM hit the news again. It launched a BeBold Campaign in early January.  It asked its Twitter followers to tweet their New Year resolutions under the hashtag #BeBold.  All was going well until late January when the marketing team created an infographic showing the characters in Bold Team.

This infographic was created with the results of the BeBold Tweets. The majority of Tweets showed that we want to:

Do something different -- such as run a marathon

Stand up for ourselves

Connect with others more

Speak up for what we believe in

These are great qualities, and RIM was right to publish the results in an easily digestible form.   Unfortunately, Twitter and the newswires were not happy about the choice of graphics.

The characters, chosen to represent the main themes of the resolutions, represent Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.

Tweets criticised the poor choice:

RIM when we suggested you #beBold with your business strategy this is not what we had in mind

The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully

People, be gentle with the #RIM senior managers behind #bebold. They're going to be out of work and have no marketable skills.

The BlackBerry blog updated its post to say that it was all a bit of fun:

We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to Be Bold in 2012. More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organize the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign.

Now we have your attention..

The new CEO Thorsten Heins said that RIM would target the consumer market with BlackBerry 10 and it looks like this device will do just that.  Coincidentally, the #BeBold theme also targets the consumer market.

Great timing. BlackBerry, you certainly have our attention now.

As Jared tweets:

#BeBold might be just crazy enough to work. And by that, I mean, Blackberry jumped the shark right into its candy-colored cartoon mouth.

Now it's time to deliver on your London promise...

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• RIM- New CEO but same old problems, failed strategy

Image credit: RIM