Love is Blind
Roger Goodell, the National Football League commissioner, has taken a serious bruising over the past few years – from #Deflategate to serious issues about player safety and, most recently, protests during the national anthem. @foragument, a Twitter user named Jones Smith with no profile picture and no following, is sick of it.
The account has tenaciously gone after sports media accounts criticizing Goodell. But who is Goodell’s courageous defender, the David Andrews to his Tom Brady? The Wall Street Journal inspected the account after noticing how regularly it replied to sports writers at the publication and found that it was none other than Jane Skinner Goodell, Roger Goodell’s wife!
. Let this be a lesson for those thinking about sneaking around online, whether doing some reconnaissance, outreach to stakeholders or inflating engagements on a post: covering your tracks is hard and only getting harder.
Like love, social media can sometimes be blind, but rarely totally anonymous.
Pin for the Win
Here’s a fact that might surprise you: Walmart’s social media chief, Christine Martinez Loya, has 30 times more Pinterest followers than Walmart. That’s pretty huge, but considering Walmart’s best-known online references might be the infamous “People of Walmart” lists, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that users looking for glitzy interior design tips and quaint DIY how-tos aren’t flocking to the company’s page.
Loya thinks, though, that this platform will be pivotal in shaping the perception of the brand, which is trying to expand further into the upscale market with acquisitions like the clothing brand Bonobos, while fighting Amazon with its new e-commerce offering, Jet.com.
Meanwhile, other voices are speaking up highly about the platform, with David Jones, the former CEO of Havas, claiming that we’re entering a new era in the “internet economy”, which he coins the “interest economy phase”. As we already see certain groups splintering off or creating cadres on specific platforms (think Finance Twitter), identifying and targeting stakeholders based on interests will continue to grow with importance. Will Pinterest be poised to go beyond moms and millennials?
For the Love of Tech
A lot of clients ask us about “the next platform” or “what’s next” in social and digital media. While we applaud the foresight, we often also caution from running headlong into a new platform just because there’s a new one to run into. We might have offered the same advice to the folks at Facebook.
Last week, in the wake of hurricane Maria, Mark Zuckerberg and his head of social VR, Rachel Franklin, morphed into legless avatars to offer a VR tour of Puerto Rico. The thinking was to showcase Facebook’s dreams of bringing VR mainstream while also showing off Facebook’s contributions to the recovery effort on the island.
Unfortunately, the tone of the video struck some viewers as oddly self-promotional, showing off how VR can take users on an immersive journey rather than somberly addressing the loss of lives and livelihoods. We’re all in favor of new and creative ways of delivering messages, but sometimes it’s better to stick with more traditional methods in dire situations, rather than use tech for tech’s sake.
Time for Reddit
Reddit has long been the platform behind the scenes, guiding what bubbles up to the surface of the internet. Now, for the first time, a publisher is looking to cement that role with a formal editorial relationship. Time magazine recently signed a partnership with Reddit, whose staffers will help flag original stories on the platform to Time editors.
These will then find their way into an article series published every Thursday, to be distributed via Time properties, Time’s Reddit page, and Apple News. Ushering in a new era of media relations, perhaps?
The Reading List
‘MeToo’ hashtag lights up Twitter and Facebook with sexual assault stories TheNextWeb
LinkedIn is finally selling autoplay video ads Recode
Vox Media Pitches Signature ‘Explainer’ Format to Advertisers WSJ
The New York Times released new staff social media guidelines, so phew, thankfully that’s settled Nieman Lab
Facebook Buys TBH, a Teen-Targeted Anonymous Poll App WSJ
Hump Day Helper
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