As my tumid eyeballs recover from the slowly thawing permafrost that impregnated my normally balmy facial area during the meteorologically catastrophic month of February, I am now much better placed to present another slice of steaming social media pie – drizzled with the bubblingly optimistic custard that only the impending death of winter can muster.
If like me, you are an archly miserable cynic, who perceives the modern interpretation of ancient feast days like Valentine’s Day as transparent opportunities to flog juggernauts of tat and engender feelings of guilt in people who are unable to express their connubial love all-year-round – then you’ll love what happened to Interflora this month!
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It was pistils at dawn for Google and Interflora, when instead of saying it with flowers they riled the mighty search beast by saying it with over 150 advertorials containing paid links on various news websites, breaching Google’s PageRank guidelines in the process. To clarify, in order to keep the search engine sweet in this regard, any paid links must have some code attached which bypasses PageRank and debilitates any SEO potential. The punishment was swift and brutal, as the Interflora site was banished from Google’s search results and surely made a substantial impact on their traffic. It just goes to show that large established organisations are not immune to suffering severe penalties when fundamental rules are flouted. In addition to the sanctions endured by Interflora, the PageRank of many of the associated newspapers that hosted the offending advertorials were similarly deflowered.
If you prefer not to risk precipitating a bout of allergic rhinitis in your loved one, or floral tributes seem a little funereal, you may want to express your devotion with a nice meal out somewhere: The U.S. restaurant chain Applebee’s might be an option, as long as they haven’t fired the waitress, that is.
When a hungry pastor took exception to an 18% service charge (not exorbitant across the pond), she scrawled, ‘I give God 10%, why should you get 18?’ on the receipt. Some time later, the waitress – possibly wondering where the milk of human kindness had disappeared to, or questioning the sincerity of the pastor’s vocation – posted a photo of the offending chit on a social media site and was summarily dismissed for infringing customer privacy.
Social media users immediately sated their outrage in a predictably visceral manner, then, some ill-advised Facebook responses and foolhardy deletions later – Applebee’s published an excruciatingly oleaginous statement, that signally failed to pour oil on their troubled waters. Threats of mass boycotts, exposés of previous similar privacy infringements by Applebee’s itself and and job offers for the wronged employee ensued; so all in all a huge example of how to make a social media crisis spiral out of control into a convoluted PR disaster.
They say you can’t put a good dog down and Nipper was certainly no exception when a handful of malcontented HMV staff commandeered their master’s voice by hijacking the company Twitter account and airing their insurrectionary reportage as the heads fell.
Understandably, emotions were running high, but what really came to the fore was a real sense of affection for the brand itself and regret that the situation had reduced them to indulging in uncharacteristic behaviour.
One tweet read, “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?’”, but by the time this came to light, the record was already well and truly out of the sleeve – as it were.
Twitter hijacks were seemingly the flavour of the month, when hackers plucked the metaphorical security gherkin from the social media burger of life, causing the Burger King Twitter feed to be branded with the McDonalds logo and flooded with spurious McTweets. This took place on Presidents Day – a public holiday in the US, which resulted in an unusually slow reaction from Burger King’s PR and crisis management teams.
What this and the HMV story highlight, is the fact that Twitter’s password protocols are clearly not providing enough protection from cyber-attacks. If social media companies want to encourage other big brands to use their services , the onus is on them to prove that sufficient security safeguards have been put in place, so that these kind of potentially brand-damaging breaches will be kept to a minimum.
For those of you who enjoy nothing more than spending the long winter evenings immersing yourselves in hazily romantic recollections of the three-day week, the potential of power cuts to be the mothers of invention we all secretly know them to be, has finally come to fruition: The Superbowl blackout spawned a number of notable social media happenings. As soon as the lights went out, Oreo jumped on Twitter and posted this:
The speed with which it managed to react was the brainchild of the agency 360i who ensured the decision makers were on hand to create and approve the content in lightning quick time.
On a similar note, PBS were amazingly quick off the Twitter mark, suggesting that maybe a quick detour to their channel to watch Downton Abbey – with its repressed aristocratic charm – might ameliorate the no doubt frustrated mood of the impatient Superbowl viewers.
Creating the infrastructure and forward planning to be this reactive, this quickly, to random circumstances can be difficult, but the rewards are great if you can manage it. In cases like these, there are no prizes for coming second.
So, as the stage curtain of destiny comes down on this episode, I hope you will join in congratulating me for not including any tame equine puns this month; to do so would surely be flogging a dead horse. I bid you all farewell. Exeunt stage left pursued by a mare. Blackout.
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