Earlier this month we ran a series on how local businesses are using social media. In some cases, the tools are effective and cheap ways to reach targeted customers. But they can also allow any rouge individual to speak on behalf of the company. And in that sense, the battle for public opinion keeps getting trickier.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that companies have had to be on the lookout for imposter-twitterers, people who claim to be a company, such as Exxon Mobil, but are just tweeting spam.
From the article:
Exxon Mobil Corp. has found at least two unauthorized Twitter accounts under variations of its name. Twitter — a networking service where users create profiles and send out short messages, or “tweets” to their followers — terminated one of the profiles last summer. An Exxon spokesman says the oil company is considering what to do about the second profile, which it discovered several weeks ago.
The dangers of this are obviously that a company could loose control of a message more quickly than ever. Imagine if I started an account called DomminosGuy12 and tweeted “Still molesting the pizza dough here at Dominos.” Imagine the firestorm that would create, a PR disaster.
You can read the first part here of our investigation here.
Earlier this month we ran a series on how local businesses are using social media. In some cases, the tools are effective and cheap ways to reach targeted customers. But they can also allow any rouge individual to speak on behalf of the company. And in that sense, the battle for public opinion keeps getting trickier.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that companies have had to be on the lookout for imposter-twitterers, people who claim to be a company, such as Exxon Mobil, but are just tweeting spam.
From the article:
Exxon Mobil Corp. has found at least two unauthorized Twitter accounts under variations of its name. Twitter — a networking service where users create profiles and send out short messages, or “tweets” to their followers — terminated one of the profiles last summer. An Exxon spokesman says the oil company is considering what to do about the second profile, which it discovered several weeks ago.
The dangers of this are obviously that a company could loose control of a message more quickly than ever. Imagine if I started an account called DomminosGuy12 and tweeted “Still molesting the pizza dough here at Dominos.” Imagine the firestorm that would create, a PR disaster.
You can read the first part here of our investigation here.