Case Study: A cute penance?
‘I promise I will not do it again’ x100
Early this year, a social media activist and host of online TV program ‘Fairly Current Show’ tweeted about a pregnant friend who was mistreated by her company, a renowned media company. In a flash, the HR/PR department responded and demanded for a retraction. They later took the chap to court for defamation and sought damages. Fairly current news is that they settled on the condition that this young sprightly chap would tweet his apology 100 times over 3 days in early June, 2011. He’s completed his final tweet. This unprecedented method of apologising (because the chap could not afford advertisement apology in traditional print media) has spawned media coverage in dozens of international media. Plus, has increased the chap’s twitter followers by 1000. Not bad for a 3-day ‘tweepology’ with the final 100th being re-tweeted over a hundred times – “100/100 I’ve DEFAMED Blu Inc Media & Female Magazine. My tweets on their HR Policies are untrue. I retract those words & hereby apologize.”
My question is, why? Why didn’t the media company see through this clever little gimmick, which did little but damage to their brand. Who were their advisers? Did they think, OK, here’s David. We’re Goliath. Let’s show him what we’re capable of getting him to do by entering into his universe. Personally, this seems more like a triumph by one man against a large corporate. Seriously. What WERE they thinking? That they could make our chap apologise, look bad in the digital universe he lives within? I’d suggest for any company big or small, to think again, when dealing with the social media. The social media is a space that’s somehow still shrouded with a false sense of ‘privacy’. Bloggers and Twitterers have well-formed personalities ‘underground’, they would have been ‘independently’ published for years, developed a fan-base, existed beneath the surfaces of printed media at least a good couple of years before the media moghuls registered their first Twitter account to get-closer-to-their-readers. Once daring and spoke truths, even untruths with no fear. Now, they need to be accountable for what they say. No more thoughtless publishing. No more. No, think before you write, tweet, FB, or even upload a vid. But seriously, my Gmail account just got hacked and I was apparently in Spain during the King’s Birthday weekend, robbed off all valuables and mobile phone. Won’t you help me by sending me Euros 2800 so I can come home?
If I find the perpetrators, I too would like them to tweet me an apology that they would never ever ever hack into a Gmail account again. But won’t that just glorify them? Worse still. It might even get them a top dollar contract to work for some international firm – hacking! @fahmi_fadzil… please stand up. You’ve just garnered USD500,000 in media value from your 3-day tweepology campaign. Bravo! Now, will you speak at our next FEYST – digital lifestyle & indie music festival?
Fast forward to 2019 and Fahmi Fadzil today is a Malaysian politician and member of Parliament in Malaysia. Previously written and posted in postrelease.wordpress.com by Jasmine Low. All thoughts and opinions are my own.