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Social Media

Giving Offense, Getting Noticed

I used to work as a public affairs director at a large mental health organization. Not the kind of place that would get a kick out of a recent Burger King commercial.

A man in a surreally oversized plastic “king” head with a creepy grin is running through an office building pursued by a man dressed in a white lab coat who yells, “Stop that King, he’s crazy!”

It seems the meat sovereign is insane to be “giving away” sandwiches for $3.99.

There is so much stigma assigned to mental illness that this kind of stuff puts people on edge. But as advertising, it works. I remembered it, and it garnered a lot of press notice.

When Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s hot-tempered chief of staff, criticized somebody’s stupid move as “retarded,” the uproar commenced. Sarah Palin, who has a young son with Down’s Syndrome, seized the opportunity to call for Emmanual’s dismissal. Proving once again that one person’s/organization’s bad P.R. is another’s opportunity.

A New Kind of Tweet

The Twitter micro-blogging service intends to mature into a formidable animal. Consequently, co-founder Biz Stone recently explained in his blog a new addition to the company’s aviary — Promoted Tweets. Translation: advertising.

It had to happen. Information may want to be “free,” but information providers and platforms don’t necessarily want to be, at least not forever.

Like other Tweets, the Promoted variety will be limited to 140 characters, and readers can respond to them or pass them along (“retweet”). The difference is, business and organizations pay to have placed at the top of relevant Twitter search results. They will be labeled as “promoted.”

Distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising, promoted Tweets are start off as regular Tweets (they’re an “organic” part of regular Twitter). Promoted Tweets will also be timely, to connect the user in a real-time event, for example.

Much as Google does with unsuccessful AdWords, Twitter will drop a Tweet’s Promoted status if it doesn’t “resonate” with users (meaning they don’t respond to the Promoted Tweet in some way). Initial advertisers include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.

More Than 140 Characters

Knowing how to use Twitter effectively to advance media and promotion goals has become a crucial skill. Naturally, there are a host of business and publications that seek to help you out, some charging up to $150 for the privilege. Now you can visit Twitter itself for its own best-practices blog. And it’s free. Called “Twitter Media,” the new blog has entries so far on choosing the right API (application programming interface), how to fight off Twitter cybersquatters and a look at tweeting from Haiti. Don’t worry, though, the entries are more informative and substantive than the 140 character-maximum of Twitter’s signature “Tweets.”

http://media.twitter.com/

Unmasking Anonymity

Posting comments online is an addictive, and contagious, activity – where would the Internet’s viral vibrancy and interconnectivity be without it? But should site operators allow visitors to post anonymously?

Journalists especially wonder what good purpose it serves for anonymity to be offered to those who add comments to the end of online reportage. Some papers, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, require the posters register, but that information is not publicly available.

Anonymity is no guarantee, however, merely a courtesy or a custom. Case in point, The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently outed a judge for anonymously posting on its website disparaging comments about a local lawyer with cases before her court. Her Honor is suing for violation of privacy.

Bear in mind that not much if any whistle-blowing deserving of anonymity is occurring in these comment streams. Instead they tend to be postings from people who don’t want the boss to know what they’re really doing during work hours — or they’re excretions from the petty, the obscene, and the venomous. “A lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl,” William Grueskin of Columbia University’s J-School said in the New York Times (4/12/10), “with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher.”

So news organizations are pondering and tweaking (… it doesn’t help the cause of anonymity that advertisers don’t care to see their ads pop up next to some unexpectedly nasty comment). The Washington Post, for instance, is planning a system of “user tiers” based on the credibility a user has garnered from other users, much as Amazon.com displays more prominently the product reviews voted “helpful” by other readers/reviewers. The new Post system might give more prominence to commentators using their real names.

On the matter of message board policing, many sites already provide this function but usually lack the resources to keep up with the volume — or check to make sure that divulged identities and email addresses are legitimate. But there is hope for the future of honesty, integrity, and courage (or perhaps just for imprudence): Younger generations tend to be more comfortable attaching their names and faces to their beliefs and preferences (even though it’s often TMI – too much information – another problem altogether).

Calling it an “education process,” Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington told the Times, “As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”

One Man’s Meat

The same event can be nutritious P.R. for one organization and toxic to another.

Case in point: the Greenpeace assault on Nestle’s Facebook page, a barrage of comments designed to embarrass the global conglomerate into stopping its use of palm oil, which conservationists maintain leads to the destruction of Southeast Asian rainforests and their inhabitants. (The campaign created a widely viewed video of a man opening a Nestle Twix chocolate bar  and biting into a orangutan’s bloody severed finger.)

As a result of Greenpeace’s “brand-jacking,” Nestle went into “damage control” mode and promised to stop buying palm oil from Sinar Mas, the big Indonesian supplier of oil to Nestle.

It was  a moment of triumph for Greenpeace. “Facebook has become a hotbed for activism,” Greenpeace press officer Daniel Kessler told Joe Ciarallo of PRNewser, (4/5/10). “We have offices in 40 countries and many of our offices are participating in this campaign. Each has their own Facebook page.”

More is coming. As noted on PRNewser, a blog post on Greenpeace’s Web site states, “There’s no quick-PR-fix to get out of this one; Nestle is going to have to really clean up its supply chain.”  Kessler said, “They need to do supply chain analysis to make sure they’re not sourcing palm oil.

PRNewser also points out that Greenpeace now has a campaign to force change at Facebook itself. The activists want the social media site to use renewable energy to run its data centers. The new group on Facebook – “We want facebook to use 100% renewable energy” — has more than 200,000 members.

Social media isn’t just for personal frivolity or a new conduit for selling – it’s proving to be a powerful tool for passionate change seekers.  The world is changing, rapidly. Corporations and institutions had better get ready by putting in place rapid-response crisis management – before the next dust-up occurs.