A Raw Inside Look Into Social Media by Jeff Toohey - HTML preview

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When Social Media Backfires

 

When social media marketing is done correctly it can be blissful but when you cross that invisible line you can destroy an entire corporation in 60 seconds. Here are some entertaining examples of corporate fails on social media.

Razer Talks Dirty to Apple

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The 2016 MacBook Pro has a lot going for it, but the lack of a secure digital (SD) slot drove the competition at Razer to tweet something at the tech behemoth: "You call yourself Pro? S my D," read the message atop the photo of an SD card in the Razer Blade laptop. The response: despite 4,800 "likes" on the tweet, the Internet coverage was mind-bendingly bad, especially in the wake of Gamergate and in the time of Candidate Trump. Razer tried to defend the position as "just proud of our SD card slot," but that didn't last long. By the next day it deleted the offending tweet and posted: “We apologize for the SD reader joke. To those who were offended, it was intended as a lighthearted turn of phrase that missed the mark.”

US Airways Tweets a Naughty

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ESPN Analyst Links to PornHub

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American Apparel's Challenge

On Fourth of July 2014, the clothing chain American Apparel tried to share an image of "#smoke" and "#clouds."

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What it used was a Photoshopped image of the exploding space shuttle Challenger from 1986. Der.

Chrysler Hates Detroit Drivers

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Most people controlling corporate accounts also have personal accounts. Sometimes they get mixed up. Chances are, the person who did this one for ChryslerAutos didn't get to run the corporate account for much longer.

Racist Bot

It's just a chatbot. What could go wrong? Plenty.

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Microsoft wanted to test out its artificial intelligence software, so it released the "Tay" chatbot on Twitter. Things started out innocently enough, but the Internet being the Internet, the trolls soon emerged. The bot turned out to be a huge hit with online miscreants, who cajoled Tay into repeating racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs. Microsoft later shut her down.