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Title    When a Hashtag Becomes a Bashtag
Date    Monday March 30 2015, @05:43PM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the Pete-Seeger-singing-"when-will-they-ever-learn?-when-will-they-ever-learn?" dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/03/30/0928225

Hugh Pickens writes:

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."

Links

  1. "Hugh Pickens" - http://hughpickens.com/
  2. "SeaWorld launched a new advertising campaign this week to educate the public" - http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/27/_askseaworld_twitter_amas_are_a_terrible_idea_and_yet_companies_do_them.html
  3. "twitter users bashed Sea World relentlessly" - https://twitter.com/hashtag/askseaworld?src=hash
  4. "the hashtag gave critics a highly visible forum to share their top McDonald’s horror stories" - http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-twitter-campaign-goes-horribly-wrong-mcdstories-2012-1
  5. "discovered that crowd-sourced campaigns are hard to control" - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/

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