6 ms·

UK National Lottery's Twitter PR Disaster

54 points by sjcsjc 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Why won't people learn that creating a twitter bot when its attached to a large corporation will create a PR disaster ? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-tweets/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-tweet...
- turdnagel 9y ago
  It's not necessarily a Twitter bot - it's any project on any platform that broadcasts user-generated content out without vetting.
SirHound 9y ago
Sounds like a phenomenal success, then.
- e12e 9y ago
  Yeah, I think such social media "failures" has long since become a canned recipe for generating free media hype. It allows brands to tap into obscene words and imagery by proxy ("we didn't know") - but gets lots of press and organic traffic as people make anything from meme jokes to hate speech. Case in point: the UK national lottery just reached whatever fraction of hn users that are possible customers, probably nudging a few percent of those to remember to buy lottery tickets.
  - JimDabell 9y ago
    Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius.
petepete 9y ago
"Yer da sells Avon" is definitely my favourite regional insult.
- hacktothefuture 9y ago
  Can you explain this one please?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - moron4hire 9y ago
    I found a video on YouTube when I googled for it, that was kind of homophobic. Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad".
    - petepete 9y ago
      I don't think it's homophobic but it's definitely sexist.
      - ThePadawan 9y ago
        I'm only sort-of aware of the background on this one, so bear with me: Avon is a brand of cosmetics being sold door-to-door, so it became a favorite of many transvestites in the UK, many becoming Avon salespeople themselves. So "Yer da sells Avon" could also be meant to imply "your dad is a transvestite".
    - lin_lin 9y ago
      > Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad". Wait, would you really not cop that right away?
      - moron4hire 9y ago
        "Da" is not common in the US. If I saw it on its own, I would almost certainly assume it was the Russian word for "yes" before I drew connection to "Dad". Most people still say "Dad" without dropping the ending, or "Pa" if they were raised by heathens. Also, when I first saw the image, I read it as "Yerda", which I assumed to be something like a female given name of some sort of Scandivanian origin.
frou_dh 9y ago
In which the social media offense economy has both supply and demand
jaymzcampbell 9y ago
Ah, this brings back memories of an adidas campaign I worked on for the Stan Smith launch in the UK. I had a backend that would automatically generate an image from a given tweet [1] but we were mindful of this exact sort of problem so built a whole CMS around it to allow a social media manager to automatically tweet back from the official adidas account. It would include their stylised label and various auto-populated messages they could edit if they liked. All works well until the evening shift comes on based outside of the UK and they end up sending out a tweet [2] with a picture of Dr Harold Shipman - a notorious serial killer [3]. [1] https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840 https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840 [2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-shipman-in-adidas-ad/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-sh... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman
- JimDabell 9y ago
  Yep, I worked on a website for a very popular British girl band almost ten years ago. The target demographic was teenage girls, and one of the requested features was to embed a Twitter feed showing a particular hashtag on the homepage to promote their album launch. The client thought it would be quick and simple because Twitter supplies that kind of thing as one line of code, however since it was pulling directly from Twitter in the browser, there was no opportunity to moderate if we did it that way. We pointed this out, with the consequences, several times, and strongly recommended that we pull it server-side so we could provide moderation, but this took extra time and money, so the client ignored us. Fast forward to the site / album launch, and sure enough, right in the middle of the big publicity campaign, some bright spark decided to tweet altered obscene song lyrics describing in graphic detail what he wanted to do to the girl band members, using the hashtag so it would show up on the website viewed by all those teenage girls. This kind of thing is entirely predictable, but the people in charge of these things are often inexperienced, overworked, and inattentive. Couple that with somebody telling them that it's going to cost more and take longer to do it properly, and they are going to go with the quicker, cheaper option unless they've been burnt by this before.
- madaxe_again 9y ago
  That's pretty special - and the whole thing reminds me of a rather more minor snafu with social media a client had. My business built and operated an ecommerce platform. At one point we added a feature that would allow retailers to populate content areas with images from twitter and instagram - they'd just pop in a hashtag, images matching that tag would flow into the CMS, and they could then choose which to publish. So far, so good. Users are tweeting product shots, retailers are semi-automatically populating their sites with them. Along comes a client - who is running a very successful campaign with it - but they're struggling to find the time to moderate everything, can we please make it auto-publish. We warn them of the probable abusive outcomes, but they aren't having any of it - they say that they'll reactively moderate. We acquiesce, but only after getting them to sign a release that essentially says "we warned you". It goes live, after having languished in staging for a month where the client adamantly refuses to test it. "We'll test it live, we'll just set a hashtag on the main homepage module, and we'll see it working." We know the change to autopublish has been tiny (a single additional setting toggle) and safe, so aren't too perturbed by this all too usual behaviour this time. Twenty minutes after it launches the client's MD (this is a £100M brand) phones, frothing and panicking that the site had been hacked and was full of porn. A glance at their usually clothing filled homepage reveals an alarming amount of flesh. At this point I'm almost impressed that they've been attacked so quickly, so hop into their CMS to do a bulk delete for them - when I start crying with laughter, for what have they chosen as their test hashtag? Only #xxx.
artursapek 9y ago
After Microsoft learned this lesson with "Tay" I'm surprised companies are still making this mistake. Also, "hijacked" seems like the wrong word. More accurate would be "misused".
- monkeyprojects 9y ago
  This is a mistake all marketing people will make (hopefully just once but we all know that won't be the case). The worrying thing is that the last similar social media fail was less than 3 months ago with Walkers Crisps showing various photos of mass murderers..
drcongo 9y ago
Things brings back memories of the fun we had when Skittles handed their website over to the internet. http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-twitter-homepage-not-so-sweet http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-twitt...
throws3bit 9y ago
This is the reason why you need Managers with a CS degree and not an MBA.
- msla 9y ago
  MBAs do stupid shit all the time.
camoby 9y ago
I’ve been working with a US based ad agency recently, who asked about some features a bit like this. I’ve had to educate them on this idea with the fact that if you give the internet a ‘pen’, sooner rather than later, they’ll draw a cartoon penis.
jpalomaki 9y ago
Would be interesting to know if some these snafus actually turned out to be disasters. Yes, it's certainly moment of embarrassment for the PR crew, but it might be that public forgets the actual thing and the brand just got visibility.
KaiserPro 9y ago
And this, dear reader is why you always sanitise user inputs. Be it a twitter bot dealing with the unwashed masses, or a simple form...
aaron695 9y ago
PR disaster? What bullshit. Do the morons behind the headline really think people will boycott the product now because of a mistake? Or is the BBC now giving out free advertising for a product? Come on sheeple. And yes it is sheeple to believe that the BBC believe their headline was also true. They know it's no PR disaster but it gets them clicks.
- corobo 9y ago
  You were making a great point until you dropped sheeple in there.

54 points by sjcsjc 9y ago

Why won't people learn that creating a twitter bot when its attached to a large corporation will create a PR disaster ? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-tweets/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-tweet...

turdnagel 9y ago
It's not necessarily a Twitter bot - it's any project on any platform that broadcasts user-generated content out without vetting.

SirHound 9y ago

Sounds like a phenomenal success, then.

e12e 9y ago
Yeah, I think such social media "failures" has long since become a canned recipe for generating free media hype. It allows brands to tap into obscene words and imagery by proxy ("we didn't know") - but gets lots of press and organic traffic as people make anything from meme jokes to hate speech. Case in point: the UK national lottery just reached whatever fraction of hn users that are possible customers, probably nudging a few percent of those to remember to buy lottery tickets.
- JimDabell 9y ago
  Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius.

petepete 9y ago

"Yer da sells Avon" is definitely my favourite regional insult.

hacktothefuture 9y ago
Can you explain this one please?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I found a video on YouTube when I googled for it, that was kind of homophobic. Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad".
  - petepete 9y ago
    I don't think it's homophobic but it's definitely sexist.
    - ThePadawan 9y ago
      I'm only sort-of aware of the background on this one, so bear with me: Avon is a brand of cosmetics being sold door-to-door, so it became a favorite of many transvestites in the UK, many becoming Avon salespeople themselves. So "Yer da sells Avon" could also be meant to imply "your dad is a transvestite".
  - lin_lin 9y ago
    > Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad". Wait, would you really not cop that right away?
    - moron4hire 9y ago
      "Da" is not common in the US. If I saw it on its own, I would almost certainly assume it was the Russian word for "yes" before I drew connection to "Dad". Most people still say "Dad" without dropping the ending, or "Pa" if they were raised by heathens. Also, when I first saw the image, I read it as "Yerda", which I assumed to be something like a female given name of some sort of Scandivanian origin.

frou_dh 9y ago

In which the social media offense economy has both supply and demand

jaymzcampbell 9y ago

Ah, this brings back memories of an adidas campaign I worked on for the Stan Smith launch in the UK. I had a backend that would automatically generate an image from a given tweet [1] but we were mindful of this exact sort of problem so built a whole CMS around it to allow a social media manager to automatically tweet back from the official adidas account. It would include their stylised label and various auto-populated messages they could edit if they liked. All works well until the evening shift comes on based outside of the UK and they end up sending out a tweet [2] with a picture of Dr Harold Shipman - a notorious serial killer [3]. [1] https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840 https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840 [2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-shipman-in-adidas-ad/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-sh... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman

JimDabell 9y ago
Yep, I worked on a website for a very popular British girl band almost ten years ago. The target demographic was teenage girls, and one of the requested features was to embed a Twitter feed showing a particular hashtag on the homepage to promote their album launch. The client thought it would be quick and simple because Twitter supplies that kind of thing as one line of code, however since it was pulling directly from Twitter in the browser, there was no opportunity to moderate if we did it that way. We pointed this out, with the consequences, several times, and strongly recommended that we pull it server-side so we could provide moderation, but this took extra time and money, so the client ignored us. Fast forward to the site / album launch, and sure enough, right in the middle of the big publicity campaign, some bright spark decided to tweet altered obscene song lyrics describing in graphic detail what he wanted to do to the girl band members, using the hashtag so it would show up on the website viewed by all those teenage girls. This kind of thing is entirely predictable, but the people in charge of these things are often inexperienced, overworked, and inattentive. Couple that with somebody telling them that it's going to cost more and take longer to do it properly, and they are going to go with the quicker, cheaper option unless they've been burnt by this before.
madaxe_again 9y ago
That's pretty special - and the whole thing reminds me of a rather more minor snafu with social media a client had. My business built and operated an ecommerce platform. At one point we added a feature that would allow retailers to populate content areas with images from twitter and instagram - they'd just pop in a hashtag, images matching that tag would flow into the CMS, and they could then choose which to publish. So far, so good. Users are tweeting product shots, retailers are semi-automatically populating their sites with them. Along comes a client - who is running a very successful campaign with it - but they're struggling to find the time to moderate everything, can we please make it auto-publish. We warn them of the probable abusive outcomes, but they aren't having any of it - they say that they'll reactively moderate. We acquiesce, but only after getting them to sign a release that essentially says "we warned you". It goes live, after having languished in staging for a month where the client adamantly refuses to test it. "We'll test it live, we'll just set a hashtag on the main homepage module, and we'll see it working." We know the change to autopublish has been tiny (a single additional setting toggle) and safe, so aren't too perturbed by this all too usual behaviour this time. Twenty minutes after it launches the client's MD (this is a £100M brand) phones, frothing and panicking that the site had been hacked and was full of porn. A glance at their usually clothing filled homepage reveals an alarming amount of flesh. At this point I'm almost impressed that they've been attacked so quickly, so hop into their CMS to do a bulk delete for them - when I start crying with laughter, for what have they chosen as their test hashtag? Only #xxx.

artursapek 9y ago

After Microsoft learned this lesson with "Tay" I'm surprised companies are still making this mistake. Also, "hijacked" seems like the wrong word. More accurate would be "misused".

monkeyprojects 9y ago
This is a mistake all marketing people will make (hopefully just once but we all know that won't be the case). The worrying thing is that the last similar social media fail was less than 3 months ago with Walkers Crisps showing various photos of mass murderers..

drcongo 9y ago

Things brings back memories of the fun we had when Skittles handed their website over to the internet. http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-twitter-homepage-not-so-sweet http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-twitt...

throws3bit 9y ago

This is the reason why you need Managers with a CS degree and not an MBA.

msla 9y ago
MBAs do stupid shit all the time.

camoby 9y ago

I’ve been working with a US based ad agency recently, who asked about some features a bit like this. I’ve had to educate them on this idea with the fact that if you give the internet a ‘pen’, sooner rather than later, they’ll draw a cartoon penis.

jpalomaki 9y ago

Would be interesting to know if some these snafus actually turned out to be disasters. Yes, it's certainly moment of embarrassment for the PR crew, but it might be that public forgets the actual thing and the brand just got visibility.

KaiserPro 9y ago

And this, dear reader is why you always sanitise user inputs. Be it a twitter bot dealing with the unwashed masses, or a simple form...

aaron695 9y ago

PR disaster? What bullshit. Do the morons behind the headline really think people will boycott the product now because of a mistake? Or is the BBC now giving out free advertising for a product? Come on sheeple. And yes it is sheeple to believe that the BBC believe their headline was also true. They know it's no PR disaster but it gets them clicks.

corobo 9y ago
You were making a great point until you dropped sheeple in there.