Censoring Social

Posted by Andrew Pearce in Opinions on 7th October 2010

We recently launched a marketing campaign involving social media engagement with the public. This campaign included a live twitter feed to our website, when some negative tweets appeared using our Hashtag, it was suggested that we moderate (censor) the live Twitter feed to our website, thereby only allowing the positive Tweets to be published.

This led us to consider the whole idea of moderation and censorship in social media. Companies harness the power of social media for customer communication, customer services, marketing, sales, amongst other things. Social media is about communication  It’s about having dialogue with your end users or customers. It’s about respecting an individual’s right to express their views and having a discussion with them about it. Social media is about embracing the freedom of speech.

The whole point of any company getting involved in social media is to learn what people were saying about you. It should be focused on learning from the good AND the bad, and not being afraid of it. There’s no point avoiding it, with any brand people have positive and negative experiences – social media should be about identifying the postives and patting yourself on the back, and the negatives, so that businesses can learn and make the changes necessary to make their service better.

Earlier this year Dominos Pizza developed a new campaign to kick off their improved pizza, which included a live Twitter feed, using the hashtag #newpizza. Dominos had it seemed, decided to face criticism head on. They received mixed feedback, negative, positive, confused and curious. Whilst professing complete transparency, they were actually called out for censoring tweets, despite their CEO Patrick Doyle saying at the time: ‘The old days of trying to spin things simply doesn’t work anymore. Great brands going forward are going to have a level of honestly and transparency that hasn’t been seen before’. They were forced to change tactics and lift the moderation process they had installed allowing the all the Tweets using the Hashtag. It seems even with a ‘complete transparency policy’ it takes a brave marketeer to allow all negative Tweets!

Social media, and Twitter particularly, is a wonderful instant medium that means anyone can have an opinion on anything, anywhere, anytime.

Companies only recognising positive Tweets and feedback, are going shopping with the best friend that tells them they look good in everything, and we all know that’s not always the case.