
UK National Lottery's Twitter PR Disaster - sjcsjc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40935410
======
jaymzcampbell
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-
sh...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-shipman-in-
adidas-ad/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman)

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

~~~
CodesInChaos
How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright? "Scrape random
images off the internet without the site's or the user's consent and upload
them to a website for commercial purposes" doesn't exactly sound legal to me.

~~~
msla
> How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright?

Somewhere between "Better to ask forgiveness than to get permission" and "Fuck
it, we'll do it live!"

You know, the usual response to copyright laws on the Internet.

As an addendum, a nontrivial number of people think copyright laws are about
plagiarism:

[http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/](http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/)

(Copyright laws have nothing to do with plagiarism. Acknowledging whose
copyright you violated does nothing to help you. Plagiarizing without directly
copying is likely legal.)

------
zitterbewegung
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-
tweet...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-
tweets/index.html)

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

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

~~~
hacktothefuture
Can you explain this one please?

~~~
moron4hire
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".

~~~
lin_lin
> Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad".

Wait, would you really not cop that right away?

~~~
moron4hire
"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.

------
camoby
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
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.

------
SirHound
Sounds like a phenomenal success, then.

~~~
e12e
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
Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the
hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius.

------
KaiserPro
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...

------
drcongo
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-twitt...](http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-
twitter-homepage-not-so-sweet)

------
aaron695
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
You were making a great point until you dropped sheeple in there.

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artursapek
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
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..

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

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throws3bit
This is the reason why you need Managers with a CS degree and not an MBA.

~~~
msla
MBAs do stupid shit all the time.

