Social Media in the News
March 10th, 2009 by Simon HeseltineSocial media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.
Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so. But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ’shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others. Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:
Boring Boring Facebook
How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:
- “I hate my job”
- “My job’s boring”
- “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”
Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring. She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem. However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal. So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic - bored.
Ryanair hates bloggers
A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0. It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error. His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying
jason! you’re an idiot and a liar!!
erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with
Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.
Wonderful customer service. But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?
It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.
Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar? Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.
Twittering Skittles
Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form). Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”. Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product. Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.
Is this innovative, risky or both? More importantly is it working for them? If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to. Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…
As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet. That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else. However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them. Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin. All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.
Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site. I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.
For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles? All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow. This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.
They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site). Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.
ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.
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