Recent quotes:
Denton: "Of course a brand can be your friend"... or Dr. Seuss gets an MBA
By generalizing about brands, and treating them as uniquely duplicitous organizations, we lose our ability to differentiate between good brands and bad brands. Worse, we lose the ability to encourage any kind of incremental progress, by identifying better social media campaigns that Coca Cola might learn from, for example.2I don't think it's true that generalizing about brands prevents us from differentiating between them. In fact, I'd argue that refusing to acknowledge the profit motive at the heart of corporate branding exercise makes analysis even more difficult. And in any event, I don't see why that prank—or Sam's essay—don't point to the "incremental progress" you seem to want. It is fairly obvious to me that a "better social media campaign" would be one in which a major corporate brand does not attempt to enforce a vision of slick positivity using an unsupervised and easily hijacked bot. We can't hold brand managers hands through the vagaries of Twitter, nor do I think we should be obligated to.Max ReadView discussion >>3(I just wanted to note that we appear to have encouraged some kind of "incremental progress," at least, by ensuring that Dove's smarmy new Twitter-positivity campaign won't be automated.)Max ReadView discussion >> Brands are shorthand reputations. Everybody has one, not just corporations. Think about yourself. You work for me; and I am a proud builder of media brands. Our journalism depends on technology and entertainment brands who covet our audience more than our docility. Your department's board has a blog presence, Politburo, which suggests ironic communist dinosaur.4It seems pretty clear to me that Biddle's essay is using "brands" as shorthand for "corporations" (or maybe more specifically "consumer-product corporations with fawning 'colloquial' social media presences"), not in the so-general-as-to-be-meaningless sense of "reputation." The shorthand works because it calls attention in particular the consumer-facing departments and aspects of a corporation.Max ReadView discussion >> Sam, you write for a brand within a brand within a brand. In fact, you are yourself a brand: puerile, nihilistic, infuriating, occasionally infuriatingly brilliant.Here's How Sprite Tries to Buy Off Reporters With Free Tickets
Here's the thing: Because the approximate value of these tickets is so high and they are not conventional media passes, our legal counsel has made us aware we must create a formal agreement with any outlet to which we are providing the tickets. So, we propose an agreement with very minimal asks.Gawker live-blogs SUXORZ
Brand social media accounts frequently publish offensive or otherwise ill-advised tweets, messages, or status updates. To keep readers of Gawker better appraised of offensive brand social-media activity, we're collecting all future coverage into a single, updating post, with the latest brand offense at the top.
The planning began in early March, when one of Cunningham's colleagues on the social-media team, Jessica Lindsay, sat down with a Huge project manager and someone from the agency's strategy department to begin planning social-media posts for April.
There, they discussed general themes the brand could talk about over the course of the month and create a calendar of proposed post ideas. In April, the brand would be continuing its "Art of Cheese" campaign, which provides its 100 Twitter followers and 220 Facebook fans with tips on how to best enjoy its products.
The campaign had previously been running on various food and cheese blogs before Huge created President Cheese's social-media accounts from scratch at the beginning of April.
Shortly after the initial meeting, Lindsay met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered on the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular during the spring, was best served at room temperature.
The copywriter and designer met the next week to create the image for the tweet, which was then pitched at a team meeting alongside other posts for April. The meeting includes Lindsay, the copywriter, a designer team, and a project manager.
Then it's on to an internal review, where senior copywriters and strategists sign off on the work over the course of the following week. The post was then sent to President Cheese and, some 45 days after conception, published on the internet for the world to see.
Thus far, the post has yet to be retweeted, but it has generated two favorites.
We love everything about this event.
Though the program has been available for students’ use for the last three semesters, it was only last Wednesday that the brothers were approached about the website. University Registrar Gabriel Olszewski sent them an email citing concerns that the website was “making YC course evaluation available to many who are not authorized to view this information,” asking how they obtained the information, who gave them permission to use it and where the information is hosted. In subsequent exchanges Olszewski raised concerns over the website’s unauthorized use of the Yale logo and the words “Yale” and “Bluebook,” the prominence of class and professor ratings, the application’s accessibility to non-undergraduates, and the fact that it wasn’t hosted on Yale’s servers. When the brothers met with Olszewski two days after the first email, they said they were told that the website had to be shut down.
Summer's Eve's sassy black talking vagina; Pine-Sol's subservient cleaning lady; Popeyes Southern sounding "Chicken Queen" and countless others. I am certain most of them were done innocently enough. And many of you reading this may not even be aware that these efforts rubbed people the wrong way.
But today's social-media landscape lends itself to hearty and mercurial retribution. Two words: Black Twitter.