Ask Jonny: The dangers of a hashtag campaign.

Trending on Twitter is something social media managers dream about. They've spent ages thinking up their idea, they've had sleepless nights planning the details of how it will all unfold and they've had to convince a host of other people (namely the client) that it's worth the risk to do. All they want in return for all this work is for people to talk about it, and trending is the ultimate sign that this goal has been achieved.

Brilliant.

But today when Norwich City Football Club's #AskJonny was trending it was for reasons different to those they would have been hoping for. The Premier League outfit started the idea with a tweet asking for fans to submit their own questions for the midfield player that they would put to him later before revealing his answers at the end of the day. It was a great initiative designed to give the fans a feeling of connection with the player and ultimately to get people talking about the club after a weekend on social media dominated by FA Cup headlines and Uruguayan handballs.

All well and good...

Until, that is, Jonny Howson's ex club Leeds United's fans had their say. They ambushed the hashtag and started submitting their own questions such as these below:

This was not, ideally, the sort of response Norwich City were after.

But was it worth it? In this underpaid copywriter come social media consultant's opinion, yeah, it probably was. Norwich aren't a massive club relative to other sides in their league so any publicity is good publicity for them and they were being talked about by hundreds of thousands of people all day. When their social media team do their report on the campaign tomorrow they won't focus on the fact a load of rival team's fans hijacked the idea and turned it into comedy, they'll focus on the fact they were one of the top trends for a few hours. They'll focus on how many blogs talked about the campaign and how many celebrities contributed to it. I hope they talk about this blog, oh go on, please do. Show it to Chris Hughton, that'd be nice. I met his son in a bar once and he asked me for my mate's number. Good times.

So yeah, ultimately poor Jonny Howson didn't end up with many actual questions to answer, but he was reminded of how much Leeds fans dislike him which I'm sure was nice.

And if it's any consolation, Norwich, much bigger names have fallen to the same sort of fate. You're not alone.