Keep a leash on your social marketers
This week on BlogLESS starts with business as usual as yet another case of unscrupulous design ends up biting "Liquid4Health" in the ass.
Josh Peters wrote a nice little post about an experience he recently had on Twitter. In the process of being spammed by Twitter user Liquid4Health, he noticed that the user’s logo was a somewhat shoddy rip-off of the Mozy logo.
Interestingly, Liquid4Health is a marketing account on Twitter for a company called GBG. GBG’s logo is not the same as the Twitter icon in question. This seems to imply that the marketer who created, designed, and uses their Twitter account is making a series of unethical (or at least unpleasant) design and marketing decisions on behalf of the company. The lesson here? Keep a leash on your social marketers. This Twitter account is driving brand value down and attracting negative chatter on the internet. (Go ahead and Google Liquid4Health: the Josh’s article is already on the front page.)
Funnily, one of the three taglines on GBG’s homepage is “driven by ethics.” One more lesson that design ethics is not a spectator sport. You’ve got to actively ensure that your brand is ethically represented, otherwise, as Josh says, it’ll come back to haunt you.
| Tagged with: | Design Ethics, Posts with swears in them, Social Media, Twitter |
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Comments on this post
1.
Thank you for the additional insight to this. It’s really a shame to see things like this and it’s also really a shame to see how long it’s taking Twitter to respond to Mozy who I know sent them a request to take the account down due to infringing on their copyrighted material.
Without a doubt social marketers in any company need to have an eye kept on them, some people think that just because it’s “new”(or at least new to them) there are no rules and it’s just the wild west out there, and that’s just plain not true.