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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @11:58PM
I see a market for a curated twitter-like service.
Twitter is already trying to half-ass it with their anti-harassment stuff.
I'm thinking a distributed/p2p twitter where you can 'own' the equivalent of a hashtag via public-key signing. Anyone that wants to tag their message with your curated tag has to get you to sign their message. Your own username would just be another curated-tag so if someone wanted to tweet at you, you could choose to accept their tweet or not. Probably opportunities for automation or at least delegation where people you've 'friended' can tweet at you and automatically have the tweet signed. Probably also need a way to revoke a signed tweet - maybe just a repudiation or disavow function.
Of course there would still be room for non-curated tags that anyone can use.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday March 31 2015, @02:23AM
The trouble with those kinds of platforms is they never see adoption by normal people. If nobody visits then companies have zero desire to be there as well. The only way something like you are suggesting could happen is if the platform was co-opted and changed. But as soon as that happens people would start leaving.
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