In the wake of the Boston tragedy, scrutiny has inevitably turned to coverage of the situation, and who was or wasn’t respectful.
It has become an almost ubiquitous
feature of any crisis that at least one company will not know when to stop
self-publicizing. For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S, somebody at
American Apparel made the mistake of thinking they could use human tragedy to
sell clothes, and the reaction of disgust dealt a damaging blow to the brand.
Yet people are slow to learn, and
with each new disaster we see another damaged public image. In this case, it
was Guy Kawasaki. Self-proclaimed social media ‘guru’ Kawasaki schedules
constant tweets for each day (or rather, his interns do) and whilst the rest of
the Twittersphere paid tribute to the victims of the Boston bombings, Guy
continued his stream of self-promotion.
Unsurprisingly, the collective mind
of Twitter turned angrily upon Kawasaki, who responded with ‘Loving how people
with less than 1,500 followers are telling me how to tweet…’ further angering
his audience and prompting a mass un-following.
Although Kawasaki has since scrambled
to post ‘How to help Boston Victims’ tweets, the damage has been done, and the
moment of social media hubris has dented Kawasaki’s reputation
.
The lesson Kawasaki and everyone
else needs to take from this is that ‘No publicity is bad publicity’ isn’t all
that applicable anymore (if it ever was). If you upset the social media universe,
people un-follow you, un-like you and all of a sudden your audience is that
much smaller.