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17 of the most offensive and dumb Twitter, Facebook and Instagram fails The Bankers Who Think ISIS Killings Are a Hoot Just last week, six HSBC bankers in Birmingham, England, were fired over re-enacting (and recording, and posting on Instagram) a mock ISIS beheading. One of the bank employees – the one who nabbed the coveted leading role of beheading victim – rocked an orange jumpsuit as he kneeled in front of his five colleagues, who did a lovely job as a supporting ensemble in black tracksuits and balaclavas. They were fired after the super-insensitive clip circulated online, of course. In their defense, the video was reportedly made during a work-sponsored team-building exercise, and you can only do so many trust falls before it becomes boring and, quite frankly, dangerous....
The idea was cute. It always is. Ask members of the public to post there selfies with New York police officers, tag them with #myNYPD, and sing "Kumbayah" together. OK, that last part maybe not. The response was overwhelming -- overwhelmingly bad. Soon the hashtag was used as a bashtag....
Last week, Coca-Cola suspended its Super Bowl-timed, automated social campaign #MakeItHappy, when Gawker tricked the brand into tweeting out a number of lines from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In the campaign, Coke asked people to respond to negative tweets with positive ones — using an ASCII code to convert their tweets into images like singing cats and sunglass-wearing palm trees.
But while the soda giant may have been left as red-faced as its signature cans after this debacle, it’s not the first time the use of automated replies on Twitter has backfired on a brand.
Here’s a look at some of the biggest recent brand fails in automation on Twitter...
And your massive brand Twitter fail of the day goes to … Dave & Buster's! To advertise its Taco Tuesday, the restaurant chain made a joke that pretty clearly went over the line, prompting incredulity from its Twitter followers. "I hate tacos, said no Juan ever," the tweet read. Obviously, this isn't the first time a brand has tweeted out something outrageous—in this case, racist. But the question remains: How does this kind of stuff make it into the actual world?...
The first half of 2014 is already in the books, and it looks like a lot of marketers and companies didn’t learn anything from last year about social media. Many brands still made a number of bad judgments and stumbled when it came to handling their social profiles, which led to backlash and a tarnished image for some.
Mistakes can happen anytime, and with half the year already over, now is a great time to discuss some of 2014’s biggest marketing and social media blunders so far. With five full months ahead, this should serve as a great lesson for all individuals, brands, and companies trying to market themselves to the public.
Here are some things to keep in mind: - It’s easy to post things on social media, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Remember, though, that backlash can come just as swiftly and easily. Sure, people make mistakes from time to time, but with all the previous instances, everyone should know by now how not to act in public, especially if you’re representing a brand known the world over....
People oversharing on social media is often unexciting and common, but taking to Twitter to narrate personal events while they're happening seems to be the real-life version of a soap opera. We used to tune in for the latest episode, now we anxiously wait for the next tweet!
Starting with The Woman Who Live-Tweeted About a Crash Only to Learn It Killed Her Husband
Earth to Marketing...
When it comes to social media, is marketing really listening to consumers? If so, tell me why your social media sucks so badly?
There are thousands of reasons why consumers loathe old-school marketing. For all its promise, social marketing is not faring any better. We’re doomed if we don’t learn from the lessons and marketing mishaps of the past....
JPMorgan shouldn’t have announced its Twitter Q&A unless it was prepared to contend with the public’s negative view of it and other banks.
... JPMorgan’s bankers are getting used to business deals with young men who communicate in emojis and text-message abbreviations. (“During the Facebook roadshow,” according to Bloomberg, “Lee dropped his usual pinstripes for a Mark Zuckerberg-like black sweatshirt with his name on the back.”) Yet, when the bank devised the promotional Q&A, it may not have fully grasped the extent to which new media has transformed how people share information, and how this has tipped existing structures of power.
This is Twitter’s very purpose: to allow any individual to share the same space with, for instance, a hugely powerful bank. With this space comes attention and authority. Unlike at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, there are no security guards keeping undesirable elements out of Twitter. If JPMorgan executives expected that #AskJPM would attract only future job applicants—the kind who would don snappy new suits and genuflect nervously—they must have been stunned at the reckoning....
Trying to be funny is so much harder than trying to be clever. Remember: you are not a comedy professional. You are a social media professional.
An alert Convince & Convert fan sent me a Twitter direct message this week, alerting me to a gaping, self-inflicted social media wound bleeding all over the Facebook page of the Evansville, Indiana airport. The status update in question has been removed, but I grabbed some screen shots before admins realized they had no career options in stand up comedy. Here it is, in all its glory:
We just saw a tweet from Google facts that an airline in India only hires women because they are lighter, so they save $500,000 in fuel!!! Insert your women drive jokes below – haha!I have eight issues with this...
Cheerios recently tried to make the most of social media as a PR tool by doing what everyone else was already doing: designing Facebook apps to encourage its hundreds of thousands of fans to interact with the brand. Unfortunately, that plan blew up in the face of parent company General Mills. Cheerios attempted to gain the invisible, invaluable thing we call “brand loyalty” by presenting fans with an app that allowed them to write about “what Cheerios means to me” in the cereal’s trademark font. But the brand’s social team quickly discovered that many Facebook users don’t approve of General Mills’s relationship with genetically modified foods—or its political advocacy on the subject. The activists’ quick storming of the forum forced Cheerios to kill the app after just one day. Click through for the backstory.... [How to fail at social media, damage your brand and create bad PR]
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In 2015 F500 there are 9 corporations who do not use any of the social media platforms or tools examined in this study. These include: - A-Mark Precious Metals
- Berkshire Hathaway
- CenterPoint Energy
- Franklin Resources
- Icahn Enterprises
- Liberty Interactive
- Old Republic International
- PBF Energy
- Wynn Resorts.
Key findings of this study include: - In 2015, 103 corporations (21%) had corporate blogs, down 10% from 2014.
- Twitter is more popular than Facebook (78% vs 74%).
- Glassdoor (87%) has joined LinkedIn (93%) as a popular business tool.
- The use of Instagram has increased by 13% pointing to more interest in visually rich platforms.
When used correctly social media sites can be a great place to interact with other small businesses, generate new sales leads and to keep your customers up to date with your latest news and offers. When not used correctly they can become a scary place where you can destroy your online reputation....
Via donhornsby
It can't all be perfect: the worst of content marketing in 2014 stuck to old frameworks at best, and furthered harmful stereotypes or outright offended at worst. It was a particularly rough year for some pretty major brands, especially on the social media front.
Luckily, their snafus can teach us all a little something about what to do better next year. So, as you're reading through our list of the worst of 2014, make some mental notes on what 2015 will look like.Without further ado....
Despite the abundance of social media marketing advice online, lots of businesses still get it wrong.The advice available to anyone trying to solidify their social media marketing strategies is endless. Still, many businesses run into the same pitfalls time and again. An infographic from entrepreneur Jason Squires details the nine most common mistakes.
Businesses and celebrities are supposed to be professional, so why are there constantly mistakes being made, sometimes by even the largest of companies? Well, the answer is because there’s a human behind those Facebook post and endless tweets. From bad grammar to getting visibly frustrated and engaging in flame wars, there are lessons to be learned from the social media faux pas of others....
Here’s another one for the bulging “Kids Are Dumb” file: it seems a Florida teenager has cost her father an $80,000 legal settlement with a single, profoundly ill-advised Facebook post. Patrick Snay, 69, had served as headmaster at a Miami private school called Gulliver Preparatory School until 2010, when his contract wasn’t renewed. Snay sued Gulliver for age discrimination, and in November 2011, the school settled out of court with an agreement to pay Snay $80,000 in damages, $10,000 in back pay, and $60,000 in legal fees. As is often the case, one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality, with Snay and his wife promising not to tell anyone about the existence or terms of the deal. However Snay did tell his daughter Dana, a former student at the school, who now boasted to her 1,200 closest friends on Facebook: “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Gulliver alumni saw the posts and alerted the school’s lawyers, who promptly informed Snay senior the deal was off. He had obviously violated the confidentiality clause....
...However, for the most part, this was not a marketing opportunity in which cooler heads prevailed, whether it was the unfortunate racist tweets that followed Wieden + Kennedy’s lovely, multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” on behalf of Coke or JC Penney, which… oh God, where do I start?
Well, here goes. So, about halfway through the game, @adage wondered if @JCPenney had been hacked, or whether the person man- or woman-ing the account was drunk. How else to interpret tweets such as the following: "Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???"
Or the epic: “Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0”...
We polled our communities on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ asking them why they unfollow brands on each social network. Hundreds of you were quick to respond, sharing your biggest social media pet peeves.
Although there were some common issues across all three networks, there are clear differences too.We’ve made a comparison between the top 3 answers, take a look....
You can easily make the argument that young journalists need to learn that online verbal diarrhea has consequences in a business where you're expected to maintain at least a modicum of objectivity and personal distance from the audience.... In case you’re unaware of Shea Allen’s story, up until a few days ago she was an investigative reporter in Huntsville, Alabama, probably doing her fair share of personally satisfying work but I guarantee suffering through all the various indignities that go along with being a reporter in Huntsville, Alabama. That ended, both the good and bad, as soon as she published a post to her personal blog called “Confessions of a Red-Headed Reporter,” which both laid out and ever-so-gently riffed on the real life of a small-market reporter. This was the result...
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You can't legislate or easily control social media stupidity but you can learn from these 17 sorry mistakes of others.