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from the Pete-Seeger-singing-"when-will-they-ever-learn?-when-will-they-ever-learn?" dept.
Alison Griswold writes that in an effort to improve its tanking image, SeaWorld launched a new advertising campaign this week to educate the public about its “leadership in the care of killer whales” and other work to protect whales in captivity and in the wild. As part of that head-on initiative, someone at SeaWorld decided to invite Twitter users to pose their questions to the company directly using the hashtag #AskSeaWorld. That was not a good idea as twitter users bashed Sea World relentlessly. "As easy as it is to make fun of SeaWorld here, the real question is why any company still thinks hosting an open Twitter forum could be good for public relations," writes Griswold. "So maybe SeaWorld’s social and PR folks just really have no idea what they’re doing. Even so, you’d think they’d have learned from the corporate failures before them."
Let’s review some of the times this has backfired, starting with the infamous McDonald’s #McDStories Twitter campaign of January 2012. Rather than prompting customers to share their heart-warming McDonald’s anecdotes, the hashtag gave critics a highly visible forum to share their top McDonald’s horror stories. MacDonalds pulled the campaign within two hours but they discovered that crowd-sourced campaigns are hard to control. Three years later the #McDStories hashtag is still gathering comments. "Twitter Q&As are a terrible idea.," concludes Griswold. "A well-meaning hashtag gives critics an easy way to assemble and voice their complaints in a public forum. Why companies still try them is a great mystery. Maybe they’ll all finally learn from SeaWorld and give this one horrible PR trick up for good."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @09:00PM
Which raises the question, how many people bashing Sea World are doing so just because the saw some trendy movie and think they're totally righteous?
Which raises the question, how many people bashing people bashing Sea World are doing so just because it's trendy in their tribe and think they are totally righteous?
Social change requires informing people who were otherwise ignorant because most people are too busy living their lives to pay attention to much else. Shitting on someone because their social protest is not pure enough is just a way to make yourself feel better by putting down others.
Go ahead, shit on a politician for taking up a cause and then dumping it once it's no longer in the headlines, but not regular people. Whatever tiny amount of self-serving benefit a regular person gets out of becoming a smidgeon more socially-consciousness is a perfectly acceptable price to pay. Nobody in this world is purely altruistic. You might have a leg to stand on if you were actually out there picketing Sea World yourself, but writing drunk and bitchy troll posts on the internet does not count.