6 ms·

I think the value of hiring more experienced folks to run social media (i.e. not an intern, someone with any amount of experience) is that they can actually poi

I think the value of hiring more experienced folks to run social media (i.e. not an intern, someone with any amount of experience) is that they can actually point out how ridiculous this will come off, and argue against this type of tweet. It really doesn't take that much corporate self awareness to see how bad it looks to try to force TOS on free speech on a public forum.

kayodelycaon 6y ago
> It really doesn't take that much corporate self awareness I think you underestimate how well anyone in management actually understands this. One job had me constantly pushing back on three or more paragraphs of legal text in the damndest of places. In one case, the legal text was larger than the form itself to say "we need your email to contact you with changes related to your account". Every time I contacted our company lawyer directly for clarification, he was always fine with the short summaries I wrote. I was the only person in the entire process that stopped to ask if any of this was really necessary. I guess that's why I was the developer handling all most of our legal compliance. Everyone else either didn't care or had given up.
- michaelhoffman 6y ago
  In many organizations, legal boilerplate has nothing to do with what's reasonable in the law or even what a lawyer thinks is necessary.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    Much text in business has become the ever growing wrapper for: "As the writer, I get as much monetary value as I can or at least make you believe as such and you give up as much monetary value as possible, or at least as much as I can scare or deter you from seeking. I also have no responsibilities and all rights, while you have all responsibilities and no rights." It's simply expanded out a bit more and often gives explicit examples. It's completely unmanageable for any common citizen to process and understand what you almost have to agree to on daily basis to function in our ever more privatized world. The amount of garbage I see on a daily basis wrapped with passive aggressive legal threats around every corner is mind numbing. I even still get emails from people who add footers that they own the information and if you receive it wrongfully, you're "required" to delete it. We essentially have a bunch of children running around running society through businesses driven by greed who never fully socially developed into functioning reasonable and responsible adults.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      You are right, the amount of garbage legal stuff has expanded - but mostly as a result of people doing shit they're not supposed to do. Let's take the email footer... and an email directed to the wrong person: in ye olde times, the recipient would go "not my crap, delete it" and that's it - but now, there is a real risk the recipient uses the information and publishes it, leading to monetary damage or penalties (e.g. if it was information that must not be disclosed prior to a certain date). The company can now sue the recipient or at least threaten him for disclosing stuff. Yes: the error is on the sender side, but in ye olde times the unspoken agreement was that you'd delete mails not addressed to you. Times have changed and so the legal boilerplate had to adapt. A bit more common sense across the world, especially when it comes to the trend of resolving conflicts via courts instead of talking to one another and shaking hands, and there would be a lot less boilerplate and mind-bogglingly dumb disclaimers ("don't put any animals in microwaves") in this world.
      - lainga 6y ago
        Well, I've had enough of this damn legalese. You see where 200 years of peace gets you? The world used to be run on broad but simple threats, where all we had to do was swear fealty to the man in the iron helmet, or pay the iron price.
      - lolc 6y ago
        The proposition that wrongly addressed mail used to be handled more discreetly is very dubious to me. I doubt it even holds for postal mail. It sounds a lot like the "people used to be more honorable" trope.
      - Negitivefrags 6y ago
        Okay, but can anyone find a case where this went to court and a lawyer successfully argued "Your honor, it's not our fault the info was leaked because we put a disclaimer at the bottom of the email when we sent it to the wrong person!" I'm skeptical. If the language doesn't actually prevent liability anyway, then get rid of it.
    - jdsully 6y ago
  - nkrisc 6y ago
    This is true. In a previous job the amount of legal text we needed to include depended on whether we had been sued for something related previously.
- mangoman 6y ago
  Generally I agree that most folks in an organization just don't bother to contribute or push back once 'legal' gets involved. It's a shame - I think if people just tried to understand even a little bit beyond the surface, this whole tweet could have been avoided... if they had instead just said like "We're compiling something special for May 4th! Tweet @Disney using the hashtag #MayThe4th with your favorite Star Wars memory and you may see your memories featured (subject to TOS)" I think generally it's more honest. but yeah i guess no one cares to be 'that person'.
- tomerv 6y ago
  Seems to me like you're proving GP's point: you had the experience and knowledge to push back against the default legal process. A less experienced person might not have done it.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> corporate self awareness This is Disney we're talking about. Their legal concerns generally trump everything. It would be ridiculous if not for the fact they're worth billions of dollars and could actually take people to court over small stuff like this.
qppo 6y ago
The Walt Disney Corporation doesn't have social media run by interns, they have one of the more active and experienced social media apparatuses out there. They have to, they're one of the largest media companies in the world. Ironically they militantly protect their brand, and have conflicting mandates and reasons for doing so (it's not just to keep the image, it's to keep others from deriving value from their brand). Sometimes those mandates interfere with each other, like we see here.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  I disagree. If you run your social media this ineptly that you become a laughing stock of the platform you are spending millions on to be "cool" and "native", then you have failed. Period.
- komali2 6y ago
  If this is considered world-class social media marketing by the Marketing World, I sense an opportunity for disruption via a social media agency that exclusively employs the Worst Marketers in the Marketing World.
  - qppo 6y ago
    I mean all the power to you if you want to disrupt that market but this isn't a marketing thing, it's the conflicting goals of different organizations within a business. I'd speculate that the people running social media didn't want to send out these tweets and the people in legal told them they had to, so they do it a week ahead of time on a less visible twitter account and hope it blows over a bit.
dfxm12 6y ago
What are you more scared of, especially when your brand is more or less bulletproof? Some kind of lawsuit, or briefly looking ridiculous on Twitter?
snowwrestler 6y ago
> I think the value of hiring more experienced folks to run social media (i.e. not an intern, someone with any amount of experience) is that they can actually point out how ridiculous this will come off, and argue against this type of tweet. Is this idea--that major brands let interns run their social media--ever going to die? It's like a decade out of date, at least. It's a lock that social media at Disney is led by at least one senior official and probably maps down to multiple teams--marketing, comms, customer service, research, etc.--and probably at least one outside agency. I guarantee that Disney has people with experience in social media. From Disney's perspective, this is a positive thing for their fans because it makes it easier for the fans who want to engage with them to do so--as opposed to the usual thing for user-submitted content, which would be a "microsite" web form with similar terms and conditions. And there is very little downside. A few grumps will performatively mock Disney on Twitter for a week or so, which happens basically whenever Disney does anything. Knowing which complaints can be ignored is a good example of the benefit of actual experience with brand social media. For example, Apple had the same terms for their Shot On iPhone campaign, which no one seems to even remember: >1. How to Enter. To enter the Shot On iPhone Challenge (“Contest”), upload the best photograph that you’ve taken on your iPhone within the six months preceding the start of the Contest Period (defined below) (the “Photo”) and Tweet, post, email or upload it, as applicable, with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone for Twitter or Instagram and #ShotoniPhone# or the Chinese localized hashtag #⽤用iPhone拍摄# for Weibo, along with information indicating which iPhone model was used in the image caption, via one of the following methods: >(i)Via Twitter: Log onto your Twitter account and follow the links and instructions to become a follower of Sponsor’s page on Twitter, located at @Apple, and Tweet the photo with the required hashtags and other information. You must be an active holder of a non-private Twitter account and be a follower of @Apple to be eligible to enter this Contest via Twitter (i.e., you must make sure your tweets are set to “public” and not “private”). You must have a Twitter account to enter via this method. If you do not have a Twitter account, you can create one by visiting www.twitter.com. Twitter accounts are free. > Providing a Submission constitutes entrant’s consent to give Sponsor a royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, publish and display such Submissions in whole or in part, on a worldwide basis, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed for one year for purposes of implementing the Contest. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/au/pdfs/passions/photography/AU_iPhoneChallengeRules.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/au/pdfs/passions/photography/... Meanwhile the folks who like Disney will feed them content and data for their campaign, which is what they wanted.
owenmarshall 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_The_Walt_Disney_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_The_... I’m sure that the company who owns somewhere around 35 cable TV channels and half a dozen film studios has the stereotypical intern running social media.

kayodelycaon 6y ago

> It really doesn't take that much corporate self awareness I think you underestimate how well anyone in management actually understands this. One job had me constantly pushing back on three or more paragraphs of legal text in the damndest of places. In one case, the legal text was larger than the form itself to say "we need your email to contact you with changes related to your account". Every time I contacted our company lawyer directly for clarification, he was always fine with the short summaries I wrote. I was the only person in the entire process that stopped to ask if any of this was really necessary. I guess that's why I was the developer handling all most of our legal compliance. Everyone else either didn't care or had given up.

michaelhoffman 6y ago
In many organizations, legal boilerplate has nothing to do with what's reasonable in the law or even what a lawyer thinks is necessary.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Much text in business has become the ever growing wrapper for: "As the writer, I get as much monetary value as I can or at least make you believe as such and you give up as much monetary value as possible, or at least as much as I can scare or deter you from seeking. I also have no responsibilities and all rights, while you have all responsibilities and no rights." It's simply expanded out a bit more and often gives explicit examples. It's completely unmanageable for any common citizen to process and understand what you almost have to agree to on daily basis to function in our ever more privatized world. The amount of garbage I see on a daily basis wrapped with passive aggressive legal threats around every corner is mind numbing. I even still get emails from people who add footers that they own the information and if you receive it wrongfully, you're "required" to delete it. We essentially have a bunch of children running around running society through businesses driven by greed who never fully socially developed into functioning reasonable and responsible adults.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    You are right, the amount of garbage legal stuff has expanded - but mostly as a result of people doing shit they're not supposed to do. Let's take the email footer... and an email directed to the wrong person: in ye olde times, the recipient would go "not my crap, delete it" and that's it - but now, there is a real risk the recipient uses the information and publishes it, leading to monetary damage or penalties (e.g. if it was information that must not be disclosed prior to a certain date). The company can now sue the recipient or at least threaten him for disclosing stuff. Yes: the error is on the sender side, but in ye olde times the unspoken agreement was that you'd delete mails not addressed to you. Times have changed and so the legal boilerplate had to adapt. A bit more common sense across the world, especially when it comes to the trend of resolving conflicts via courts instead of talking to one another and shaking hands, and there would be a lot less boilerplate and mind-bogglingly dumb disclaimers ("don't put any animals in microwaves") in this world.
    - lainga 6y ago
      Well, I've had enough of this damn legalese. You see where 200 years of peace gets you? The world used to be run on broad but simple threats, where all we had to do was swear fealty to the man in the iron helmet, or pay the iron price.
    - lolc 6y ago
      The proposition that wrongly addressed mail used to be handled more discreetly is very dubious to me. I doubt it even holds for postal mail. It sounds a lot like the "people used to be more honorable" trope.
    - Negitivefrags 6y ago
      Okay, but can anyone find a case where this went to court and a lawyer successfully argued "Your honor, it's not our fault the info was leaked because we put a disclaimer at the bottom of the email when we sent it to the wrong person!" I'm skeptical. If the language doesn't actually prevent liability anyway, then get rid of it.
  - jdsully 6y ago
- nkrisc 6y ago
  This is true. In a previous job the amount of legal text we needed to include depended on whether we had been sued for something related previously.
mangoman 6y ago
Generally I agree that most folks in an organization just don't bother to contribute or push back once 'legal' gets involved. It's a shame - I think if people just tried to understand even a little bit beyond the surface, this whole tweet could have been avoided... if they had instead just said like "We're compiling something special for May 4th! Tweet @Disney using the hashtag #MayThe4th with your favorite Star Wars memory and you may see your memories featured (subject to TOS)" I think generally it's more honest. but yeah i guess no one cares to be 'that person'.
tomerv 6y ago
Seems to me like you're proving GP's point: you had the experience and knowledge to push back against the default legal process. A less experienced person might not have done it.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> corporate self awareness This is Disney we're talking about. Their legal concerns generally trump everything. It would be ridiculous if not for the fact they're worth billions of dollars and could actually take people to court over small stuff like this.

qppo 6y ago

The Walt Disney Corporation doesn't have social media run by interns, they have one of the more active and experienced social media apparatuses out there. They have to, they're one of the largest media companies in the world. Ironically they militantly protect their brand, and have conflicting mandates and reasons for doing so (it's not just to keep the image, it's to keep others from deriving value from their brand). Sometimes those mandates interfere with each other, like we see here.

arkitaip 6y ago
I disagree. If you run your social media this ineptly that you become a laughing stock of the platform you are spending millions on to be "cool" and "native", then you have failed. Period.
komali2 6y ago
If this is considered world-class social media marketing by the Marketing World, I sense an opportunity for disruption via a social media agency that exclusively employs the Worst Marketers in the Marketing World.
- qppo 6y ago
  I mean all the power to you if you want to disrupt that market but this isn't a marketing thing, it's the conflicting goals of different organizations within a business. I'd speculate that the people running social media didn't want to send out these tweets and the people in legal told them they had to, so they do it a week ahead of time on a less visible twitter account and hope it blows over a bit.

dfxm12 6y ago

What are you more scared of, especially when your brand is more or less bulletproof? Some kind of lawsuit, or briefly looking ridiculous on Twitter?

snowwrestler 6y ago

> I think the value of hiring more experienced folks to run social media (i.e. not an intern, someone with any amount of experience) is that they can actually point out how ridiculous this will come off, and argue against this type of tweet. Is this idea--that major brands let interns run their social media--ever going to die? It's like a decade out of date, at least. It's a lock that social media at Disney is led by at least one senior official and probably maps down to multiple teams--marketing, comms, customer service, research, etc.--and probably at least one outside agency. I guarantee that Disney has people with experience in social media. From Disney's perspective, this is a positive thing for their fans because it makes it easier for the fans who want to engage with them to do so--as opposed to the usual thing for user-submitted content, which would be a "microsite" web form with similar terms and conditions. And there is very little downside. A few grumps will performatively mock Disney on Twitter for a week or so, which happens basically whenever Disney does anything. Knowing which complaints can be ignored is a good example of the benefit of actual experience with brand social media. For example, Apple had the same terms for their Shot On iPhone campaign, which no one seems to even remember: >1. How to Enter. To enter the Shot On iPhone Challenge (“Contest”), upload the best photograph that you’ve taken on your iPhone within the six months preceding the start of the Contest Period (defined below) (the “Photo”) and Tweet, post, email or upload it, as applicable, with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone for Twitter or Instagram and #ShotoniPhone# or the Chinese localized hashtag #⽤用iPhone拍摄# for Weibo, along with information indicating which iPhone model was used in the image caption, via one of the following methods: >(i)Via Twitter: Log onto your Twitter account and follow the links and instructions to become a follower of Sponsor’s page on Twitter, located at @Apple, and Tweet the photo with the required hashtags and other information. You must be an active holder of a non-private Twitter account and be a follower of @Apple to be eligible to enter this Contest via Twitter (i.e., you must make sure your tweets are set to “public” and not “private”). You must have a Twitter account to enter via this method. If you do not have a Twitter account, you can create one by visiting www.twitter.com. Twitter accounts are free. > Providing a Submission constitutes entrant’s consent to give Sponsor a royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, publish and display such Submissions in whole or in part, on a worldwide basis, in any form, media or technology now known or later developed for one year for purposes of implementing the Contest. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/au/pdfs/passions/photography/AU_iPhoneChallengeRules.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/au/pdfs/passions/photography/... Meanwhile the folks who like Disney will feed them content and data for their campaign, which is what they wanted.

owenmarshall 6y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_The_Walt_Disney_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_The_... I’m sure that the company who owns somewhere around 35 cable TV channels and half a dozen film studios has the stereotypical intern running social media.