This month – where I was no doubt reported to the Plain English Campaign by my mum (and only reader) for the impenetrable opening paragraph of my last submission – I am going to make a concerted effort to curtail my penchant for sesquipedalia and make way for a less pretentious writing style defined by clarity, succinctness and lack of superfluity. Here goes…
As I slid begrudgingly into consciousness after a particularly phantasmagorical slumber – where I had incidentally been indulging in some highbrow badinage with Dr. Johnson and Bob Carolgees - I slowly disentangled myself from the iron grip of Morpheus and travelled in a state of understandable discombobulation to the bathroom to begin my matinal ablutions. Having buffed my particulars to the appropriate sheen, I ventured downstairs to scrutinise the day’s news. As the memory of Carolgees was gradually fading from my mind’s eye, I was snapped abruptly out of my dwindling nocturnal reverie by the news that the Associated Press had their Twitter account hacked, with devastating consequences for the U.S. stock markets!
As a result of of this malign action, the Dow Jones fell by over 140 points, but quickly recovered due to the expeditious action by AP to set everyone straight on the faux tweet immediately after it happened. In addition, the obvious deviation from AP house-style and the fact that this news was clearly not breaking anywhere else on the news wires, was also a big clue to it being a vaporous mound of what makes the grass grow in Texas.
Whilst this was a transitory blip in the scheme of things, it goes to show how Twitter’s role as a live disseminator of breaking news has become so interlaced with Wall Street and other national stock markets, that more of these ‘flash crashes’ are bound to happen in the future. Twitter are yet to launch their ‘two-factor authentication’ system, which will apparently prevent hacking even if the account passwords have been discovered. It can’t come soon enough for traders, enraged that the markets are so vulnerable to chicanery caused by social media channels.
One canny developer, has created an interesting web-based service called Retwact, where you can – you’ve guessed it – retract or correct an erroneous tweet, which can also be communicated to anyone who has retweeted the original content. This could have come in very handy for AP in their hour of need, as well as any other hacked or otherwise misused Twitter account. On the offchance that Mr. Baptiste is looking for a celebrity endorsement for his product, I can only imagine the perfect candidate would have to possess that rarefied blend of high-profile affability and experience in retwacting ill-advised statements.
I have touched on the ethics of social media in previous postings, but I was particularly drawn to an article posted to Experience: The Blog by Augie Ray this month. In the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing, he highlights NBC Bay Area’s invitation to ‘like’ a photograph of a young bomb victim, in order to wish him a speedy recovery and Ford’s message of appreciation for the work of the emergency services emblazoned across a branded product promotion, as two salient examples of recent ethical clangers.
Launching social media campaigns on the back of human tragedy like this, is just one element of the extremely sketchy ethics to be found in social media marketing.
Fifteen or so years ago, when social media was called online community and only consisted of message forums, the only ethical guidance that really raised its head above the parapet was a set of house rules requesting that users treat each other with respect and generally try to be all–round good eggs. Now that social media has grown into an outsize teenage savant with huge commercial potential for business, these quaint moral pointers don’t really cut it; but how do we start to formulate an ethical policy for something as young as social media and unite a phenomenon so inherently disparate, with a collective-consciousness?
It seems that there is a huge blindspot for certain marketers who consistently fall over themselves to achieve high engagement rates by chasing ‘likes’, ‘follows’ and ‘RTs’ to the detriment of any ethical considerations. The rapacious eagerness to monopolise on events of the moment, in order to demonstrate their inventive up-to-the-minuteness, seems to eclipse the inherent distastefulness found in what they believe might be a good engagement opportunity. As the recent appallingly bad taste Hyundai Suicide advert demonstrates, there should be at least one member in the creative hierarchy who has the forethought to think about the consequences.
To draw this chapter to a close, I would like to finish with a really crumby ending. Warburtons made the most of a successful April Fool’s joke and proved(!) themselves to be the toast of the town.
The spoof loaf, or ‘Sploaf’ garnered a huge response with hundreds of comments and likes. In response to this, a limited edition ‘All-Ends’ loaf was produced and sent out to all the most prevalent Facebook fans. It just goes to show that in the ageist times we live in, even the crustiest of campaigns can still pull in the dough!
Tempero on Google+
