Saturday, November 1, 2008

When social media becomes very unsociable



The website at the centre of controversy over racist abuse of British formula one driver Lewis Hamilton is owned by a New York-based advertising agency, TWBA, which is part of the world's largest media services group, Omnicom.
Read this tonight and my first thought after reading the full piece was; 'What a bunch of arse holes' and secondly was; 'This is where social media doesn't work and can back fire and in this case not from a F1 car but from the ad agency,they now have been lumped into all this melee which can be very damaging for a company.
It reminded me also of Ian Farmer, Bullseye's online strategist who delivered a brilliant insightful presentation on social media last week on what companies should and shouldn't be doing when looking at their social media strategy, one not to do is have a blog and leave it, it's a PR disaster. Ian in his closing speech also had an 'action plan' for when things like this regarding social media gone all horribly wrong.

I suggest TWBA have a peek and get some tips on how to handle this.

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