2009-02-24 at 9:52pm
Testing
National Union of Journalists and Ryanair commit Internet hara-kiri
Two jolly hilarious stories came across my radar today. The first is about the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), and Adam Tinworth, a mate who does bloggy/social media-ish stuff at Reed Business Information. Adam was surfing the analytics for his blog and checking out referrals, and in the process came across a referral from an Exchange e-mail server, from an e-mail with the subject like “effing blogs” to a recent post he did called “NUJ Still Not Getting Social Media”. He did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP and found it was the mail server of the National Union of Journalists. He posts this up for all to enjoy on his blog. What follows? An absolute shit-storm of comments, wherein someone from the NUJ makes a complete tit of himself and proves that he has almost no understanding of the way that blogging works. The whole thing is tremendously amusing and has all the usual twists and turns of counter-accusation and justification for completely failing at grokking the Internet. And then, of course, it spreads out across the blogs, with conversation continuing at a post by Kevin Anderson on the Grauniad, the Blog Herald etc.
A few days ago, a blogger called Jason Roe posted some screenshots and discussion of a rather strange anomaly he discovered while trying to book a flight from Dublin to Cork and back with RyanAir. Comments started coming in from some commenters calling themselves Ryanair staffers accusing him of lying, and being an idiot. This is a customer. Do you even need a social media expert to point out that calling your customers liars and idiots is really quite moronic. May I suggest that if you need cheap flights around Europe, you look at EasyJet and specifically for Ireland Aer Arann? And now this is circulating too (no, really, it is).
Sigh. I keep getting all these social media expert people who keep following me on Twitter, and the more I say that they are a bunch of leeches and shysters, the more of the buggers follow me. My point is just this: the Internet - call it social media if you prefer - requires nothing more than common sense, a bit of courtesy and a nose for bullshit to master. Sending e-lawyers after people, throwing huffy “you ain’t a proper journo!” comments around, insulting your customers, spreading bullshit - it makes you look like an idiotic dipshit. So, the more I see people fail, the more I realise that social media consultants and “experts” actually do have a role: helping others not be fucktards.
