Vodafone’s unmoderated #mademesmile hashtag feed. When will people learn?!
Vodafone is the latest firm (see KLMsurprise, CashGordon etc) to stick an unmoderated (though see the end of this post) hashtag feed on its website. If you use the hashtag #mademesmile, you can get tweets about them not paying enough tax published. It's rapidly turning into a car crash, as these tweets, published here show.
The site hosting the tweets
Individual published tweets
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
A tweet
Update: They took it down. There's just a big white space ... Update 2: It's back - but there are so many updates (it's the number one trending topic in London on Twitter) thatonly a fraction get few (or else they are moderating 99% out - some tax ones still getting through).
Poking around the Vodafone site, it appears to be using the http://webpurify.com/ profanity filter to protect the feed. They probably thought this was all they needed when they went home for the weekend.
Profanity filter ...
But while it automatically chops out tweets that are profane, this hasn't worked to keep out the tax messages.
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Absolutely right. However, ad agencies from the 1980s 0nwards realised that leaving white space on 48-sheet posters for car ads attracted critical graffiti and therefore more attention. No such thing as bad publicity perhaps? Fact is that most people can't see beyond the X Factor or what they're conditioned to think. #justsaying
Well if you play with fire and all that. This is going to go down as one of the great case studies of how not to do it.
Lets see how this pans out over the next few days, should be interesting that's for sure.
It doesn't seem possible that they would have the insight to create this without also having insight of the risks involved, especially considering their sensitive PR situation.