Social media PR disasters and mistakes
Summary: Social media can be a double-edged sword.. how have some companies impaled themselves?
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Habitat UK is commonly associated with fabrics and upholstery, but came under fire when it decided to hijack hashtags to promote itself.
Hashtag are used in order to 'point' a tweet at a certain conversation. Examples include #edtech (educational technology), #jobs and #business.
What Habitat decided to do, however, was hijack any hashtags that were trending on Twitter -- and therefore popular -- to market their products. From popular television show #Trueblood to the Iranian's elections' #MOUSAV tag, nothing was safe.
The online community condemned the company for its social media actions, and it was forced to apologise to the public.
See also: Gen-Y social media mistakes to avoid in a new business
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Talkback
Semi-literate writing
Sigh. "to which". Writers on ZD are soooooo.... semi-literate.
And then: "Customers that loks up the profile were no doubt confused when they met tweets in Taiwanese."
"loks up" - really?
Ok, let's face it: At ZD, editing for such minor things as grammar, or even spelling, is clearly secondary to its mission of getting out rarely-valuable articles.
Godaddy Suxx!
The animal cruelty only made me more determined to end any connection with the company and just to be clear I am not against hunting or fishing when doing so for food, but as far as I know Mr. Parsons isn't homesteading in Africa and that catch didn't have such purpose. Worse yet, it was actually justified in the lamest possible way as some sort of positive humanitarian help saying it was done to solve a problem where elephants were destroying entire harvests for the poor local communities. And that one elephant ended the problem? Does this guy and Godaddy's P.R. think we are a bunch of 2 years old?
Obviously no footage of the alleged crop destruction was ever produced, but regardless godaddy should have never taken part in such activities even it they were aiming to "solve a problem" besides at not being in that kind of business, if it was really done to help locals, there would have been no cameras and above all no reasons to take a gruesome trophy photo. On the contrary, one would have taken no pleasure in having to shoot an elephant down. I am rather confident there would be a very numerous list of individuals and companies qualified to do that before godaggy would've been called upon. Also the right company would have been involved in removing the "problem elephant", it would have been shot with a sedative and relocated to a more appropriate remote location solving the problem for the locals and keeping the animal alive.
Mr. Parsons should've just continue to stick to his shtick of featuring attractive chicks, leaving politics and animals alone.