We’ve seen companies incur a lot of media ire by insensitively using Twitter’s trending topics feature to grab more eyes for their tweets- Habitat UK and Kenneth Cole spring to mind in this regard.

However, by now we should all probably realize that if you’re tweeting on behalf of your brand or company, it’s probably best to research all ambiguous TTs before you attempt to boost your Twitter traffic by employing them. Take, for example, the brouhaha that occurred today around the Entenmann’s bakery Twitter feed.

Sometimes the TTs are conversational and almost chat room-esque, like tonight’s #youknowtheycheating. But earlier today, the hashtag #notguilty was in the top ten. And the Entenmann’s social media manager, who apparently did not move the rock for the Casey Anthony verdict, utilized said TT for a lighthearted tweet about not feeling guilty for nomming their delicious baked goods. Whoops.

It seems to be an honest mistake- unlike the incidents linked above- and hopefully no one lost their job over it. But still, be aware that while tweets are meant to be quick reads, make sure you know what you’re twittering. This could have been even more accidentally offensive.

Update: Entenmann’s social media management agency, Likeable Media, has apologized again.

[Image]

Entenmann’s Becomes Latest Twitter Trending Topics Marketing Casualty is a post from: The Inquisitr

Price Chopper, a chain of supermarkets in the northeastern US, is rapidly trying to remedy a flood of social media backlash after one of their employees went off the reservation big time in retaliation for a Syracuse University employee’s anti-Price Chopper tweet.

Last week, the shopper tweeted a brief complaint about the store, praised a competitor, and posted a picture of some questionably-arranged signage. Not a massive call-out as far as social media is concerned, and hardly behavior you might expect would come back and bite you in the derriere if you consider all the ways online activities could impact your life. However, one rogue Price Chopper employee overreacted in a bizarre and frankly scary manner, tracking down the customer at his place of employment and emailing a complaint to a random string of higher ups at the customer’s previously uninvolved workplace.

Not only did the woman contact the man’s employer- with whom Price Chopper has no pre-existing business relationship- she also requested disciplinary action be taken against the man and hinted that if the employer did not follow through, it would damage any future business that might occur between the two companies. The story emerged on a Tumblr set up specifically to chronicle the supermarket’s transgression and response, and the author describes how it all went down:

After receiving this complaint, Price Chopper’s public relations team did the unthinkable — they contacted the customer’s employer (which was mentioned in the individual’s twitter bio) requesting disciplinary action be taken against the individual for their negative post!

…Although Price Chopper did reply to the customer directly, they did not wait for a response before dragging the individual’s employer into the mix. In an email addressed to a seemingly random list of executives at the customer’s workplace, including the customer’s supervisor, Price Chopper labeled the individual as destructive and negative. They suggested that this individual’s distaste for their stores could jeopardize the relationship between Price Chopper and the company where the individual is employed, and they requested action be taken against the individual.

While the Tumblr doesn’t name names, a follow-up article from an Albany-area news site identifies all the parties involved- the shopper, the Price Chopper PR team member and the whistleblower. Surprisingly, the latest tweets coming from Price Chopper indicate the employee, who was supposedly a business reporter before joining the social media team at Price Chopper, has not been axed for the incident and ensuing clusterfracas.

The newness of social media can often trip up companies, particularly less media-oriented ones like supermarkets, as they attempt to wade in and successfully interact with what is what is essentially a variable. But it’s find it hard to imagine the thought process that preceded such a strange, creepy course of action. Surely even the least tech-savvy would understand if you wouldn’t act in a similar way in an analogous “real life” situation, such as following a customer back to their workplace and directly speaking with their boss, doing such over Twitter or email is ill-advised?

In defense of Price Chopper, it seems fairly obvious this is the work of one extraordinarily misguided individual, and their decision to allow her to remain with the company is beyond generous. (Personally, I could not imagine trusting the judgment of a person who would dream up such a scenario, but public bloodletting could make the situation worse.) However, it seems that regardless of how well it was handled after the fact, the company is doomed to be included on social media “don’t” lists for quite a while.

[via Consumerist]

Future ex-Price Chopper employee illustrates how to use social media to damage brands and scare people is a post from: The Inquisitr

John Hodgman, the dude who plays the square ‘PC’ guy in commercials and appeared on The Daily Show, provided an inadvertent lesson by example when he accidentally tweeted his cell phone number.

Hodgman was using Tweetie, possibly on an iPhone, and made the not-too-difficult mistake of posting what was intended to be a DM as a public tweet. Sequence of events:

“I haven’t heard from you and am wary of waking you up,” he tweeted — in public, by accident. “Want to say 10am? I’ll call after 9, or you can: 917-XXX-XXXX.” (Our redaction.) He quickly deleted the message, following up: “Clearly that was designed to be a DM.”

While Hodgman’s not necessarily being stalked by paparazzi or a gossip column mainstay, he still has over 82,000 followers. Chances are high he doesn’t know all or many of his followers, so the idea of a cell phone number being “out there” is a bit scary. Hopefully no one with nefarious intentions saw it- but as we all know, the internet has a long memory.

[Image: Areas of My Expertise]

Whoops! John ‘PC’ Hodgman accidentally tweets his cell number is a post from: The Inquisitr

Mashable posted this morning about YoTwits (another way of automating your Twitter feed) and asking whether automated tweets are necessarily a bad thing.

Because if Twitter needs something desperately, it’s more automated bollocksology. Personally, I think automating your tweets is douchey. The post poses the question, what if you’re not a big link sharer or don’t have the time to share the things that interest you?

Answer: Then please stop putting information out onto the interwebs. Think about it- you don’t have the time to read it or the interest in reading it. Why the hell would your followers? While the obnoxiousness of automated info-spamming isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Twitter is one of the places the practice is glaringly unwanted and disruptive. Anyone who uses Twitter regularly probably already has excessive unwanted crap in their feed, so please don’t even think about using a service like YoTwits.

Mind, I’m not calling Mashable out here- for their part, this was part of the post that sparked mine:

The most innovative concept is the Retweet Anyone feature, but it too falls victim to the same problem: you aren’t reading anything you’re retweeting. People trust your judgement when they see links retweeted by you – if they realize you aren’t reading any of them, that trust may be gone.

There may be a legitimate, non-douchey use for something like this (as I’m sure I’ll hear in the comments) but I can’t get past the utter rudeness of expecting your follwers to read something you couldn’t be bothered to even glance at.

Not to mention the fact that malware can and does sneak into your tweets more easily if you’re not watching, and even the most prominent users aren’t immune.

Is auto re-tweeting a bad thing? Yes, says me is a post from: The Inquisitr

UK home furnishings retailer Habitat is profusely apologizing after a pretty big fail on the social media front.

Habitat’s twitter page, @HabitatUK, got caught out spamming trending topics to get attention on the popular microblogging service. Okay, bad. Worse? Habitat’s offensive tweets were using the situation in Iran to boost traffic. *facepalm*

Here are some of the offending tweets.

Most Twitter users are used to those spammy tweets that annoyingly and shamelessly include every big trending topic, generally by low-rent spammers who sneak onto your followers list. #marksanfordaffair #meganfoxtransformerboobs #iphonesux, amirite? Habitat rushed to delete the tweets, but as you can see from my screengrab above (taken fifteen seconds ago), they’re still readily available in Twitter search. Habitat turned to the blogosphere to apologize, telling Social Media Today:

I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message. We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.

Back on Twitter, Habitat also addressed the issue of third-party tweeting.

In response to speculation, we would like to clarify the hashtags were not uploaded by an agency.

Habitat’s Twitter fail is fated to go down as a textbook example of how not to get social media love. Not only did they demonstrate a really poor understanding of the medium, but they alienated a group of people who generally like to interact with trusted brands. Keyword: trust. Live it, learn it, love it, Habitat.

Habitat UK’s Twitter fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

The usefulness of Twitter now stands to be further comprimised by new initiatives to entice power users to tweet for cash.

Anyone who uses Twitter can tell you what a royal pain it is to sift through spammy tweets in search of the interesting stuff. And now the company behind a controversial pay per post blogging program wants in on your Twitter feed, too.

While Izea believes sponsored Twitter postings will be “self-policed” and not run roughshod over the popular service, Twitter users know all too well how hard it is for people to resist the lure of incessant self-promotion and marketing. When directly linked with tangible financial gain, how long will it be before Twitter is useless due to the volume of spam?

This isn’t the first time Izea, formerly called Pay Per Post, has stirred up controversy in the blogosphere. From the AdWeek piece:

Izea is not without its critics, which assert that the company’s paid bloggers often do a poor job of disclosure. Julia Allison, an Internet celebrity of sorts, was heavily criticized for posting about Sea World without disclosing that her coverage was part of an Izea program. She subsequently updated her post to reflect that connection. The Federal Trade Commission recently set new guidelines for bloggers who endorse products for payment.

Even Izea’s CEO Ted Murphy admits the idea has the potential for abuse, saying:

“The question is going to be how do you meter it to make sure it doesn’t get crazy.”

If the recent Spymaster craze is any indication, it’s only a matter of time before Twitter is overrun with #spon hashtags

This tweet brought to you by… is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new wave of Twitter users got a dose of Twitter past today as the Twitter API failed, blocking access to third party Twitter clients.

As of 4pm PST, there is no official word from Twitter about the issue, with both the official Twitter account, and Twitter status page indicating their are no problems, although Twitter itself has been lit up with users discussing the issue (although naturally not via their Twitter clients.)

Twitter was once so well known for its downtime that many use to joke the only news worth reporting was that Twitter was up. This changed last year as the company got serious about its backend support, and took on new staff and funding to fix the issues.

Twitter 12 months later is, as some reports have claimed, over 1000% more popular than this time last year. Twitter has become mainstream, with everybody from politicians, celebrities, through to the general masses embracing the hottest service in town. How they’ll react is anyone’s guess, but we do know roughly is that only between 25-30% use Twitter directly, so that’s 70% odd of users who are (at the time of writing) cut off from Twitter via their favorite apps.

We’ll update the post if we hear more.

Update: as of 4:40pm PST, third party support seems to have returned. Twitter are claiming the issue was related to logins. To reconnect, shut down then restart your Twitter client, or if you’re on an iPhone or similar, log out then log in again.

Twitter users get a dose of the old days as Twitter API fails is a post from: The Inquisitr