It’s a little ironic that a movie about a man who is able to use 100% of his brain is being marketed by people who are apparently using 0%. Such is the case for the movie “Limitless” which decided it was a good idea to use a popular yet racist Twitter hashtag in an attempt to be clever in their marketing.

The results were not clever.

Simply put, when using social media as a marketing tool, remember the Hipocratic Oath. The most oft-quoted portion of the oath is “primum non nocere”: First, do no harm.

Whoever is handling the Tweets for the verified account for Limitless – guess what? You did harm. You followed a crude and obviously racist hashtag and attached your movie’s name to it. Then, you didn’t even make it funny.

Twitter can be an excellent tool for spreading buzz about a movie. Not only is this an example of one Tweet being used improperly (which has since been deleted) a quick view of their entire strategy seems amateur at best, damaging at worst. It seems that all they’re doing is tweeting at people and thanking them for saying good things about the movie. It’s idiotic and certainly doing very little to help promote DVD sales and downloads.

As a social media marketing firm, it is standard operating procedure to never insult other agencies, but this nameless group (whether internal or hired) should be reprimanded severely for this faux pas.