AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge
Greenpeace vs. Shell: The Biggest Social Media Heist Ever? It first sprang to our attention with photos like the above (our favourite); hilariously bleak stabs at Shell’s policy of drilling for oil in the Arctic. The best thing about it was that it came from the Shell-branded Arctic Ready website, where it seemed the petrol company’s bid for web 2.0 openness had disastrously backfired. So why was the site, covered in satire, still up? Tweets to @ShellIsPrepared, the related account, were mostly answered thusly: @runswithwaves Please don’t share offensive ads. We’re working to remove them. #shell #arcticready — Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) July 18, 2012 Naturally, an increasing number of tweeps RT’d the Shell community manager’s increasingly catastrophic handling of this comms disaster; he/she was clearly making it worse. Or was he/she? Fortunately, this rather handy piece in the Sydney Morning Herald summed up the whole campaign rather nicely, and attributed it all to none other than Greenpeace. Looking at the videos which started their attack, plus judging by the organisation’s past lampooning of Nestlé, this campaign has all the hallmarks, but goes several steps further.  Rarely - nay, never - has a brand been so utterly and convincingly hijacked on social media; and what’s more, Greenpeace makes it look easy. And perhaps it is. You don’t have to have a ‘verified’ Twitter account to be believed; and any logos can be copied and reproduced willy-nilly, to make an apparently-official site. So whilst Greenpeace may be moderately scared of a Shell lawsuit — for now, the oil brand seems to be denying the ecologists the extra publicity that would give them — it’s not just big ‘bad’ business that should be concerned right now. It’s all brands. Because social media is based on trust; and Greenpeace has just demonstrated how easy it is to disrupt and pervert that confidence. A benchmark case, in more ways than one…  Update: the Arctic Ready site no longer features all the user-generated ads, like the one above. And you can’t make any more on the site. Good job we kept the above one, eh?

Greenpeace vs. Shell: The Biggest Social Media Heist Ever?

It first sprang to our attention with photos like the above (our favourite); hilariously bleak stabs at Shell’s policy of drilling for oil in the Arctic. The best thing about it was that it came from the Shell-branded Arctic Ready website, where it seemed the petrol company’s bid for web 2.0 openness had disastrously backfired. So why was the site, covered in satire, still up? Tweets to @ShellIsPrepared, the related account, were mostly answered thusly:

Naturally, an increasing number of tweeps RT’d the Shell community manager’s increasingly catastrophic handling of this comms disaster; he/she was clearly making it worse. Or was he/she?

Fortunately, this rather handy piece in the Sydney Morning Herald summed up the whole campaign rather nicely, and attributed it all to none other than Greenpeace. Looking at the videos which started their attack, plus judging by the organisation’s past lampooning of Nestlé, this campaign has all the hallmarks, but goes several steps further. 

Rarely - nay, never - has a brand been so utterly and convincingly hijacked on social media; and what’s more, Greenpeace makes it look easy. And perhaps it is. You don’t have to have a ‘verified’ Twitter account to be believed; and any logos can be copied and reproduced willy-nilly, to make an apparently-official site.

So whilst Greenpeace may be moderately scared of a Shell lawsuit — for now, the oil brand seems to be denying the ecologists the extra publicity that would give them — it’s not just big ‘bad’ business that should be concerned right now. It’s all brands. Because social media is based on trust; and Greenpeace has just demonstrated how easy it is to disrupt and pervert that confidence.

A benchmark case, in more ways than one…
 

Update: the Arctic Ready site no longer features all the user-generated ads, like the one above. And you can’t make any more on the site. Good job we kept the above one, eh?

ITV and FremantleMedia’s high-profile introduction of voting into their Britain’s Got Talent 2012 app appears to have flopped embarrassingly on its first night. They worked with mobile firms MIG and Tellybug to allow people to buy virtual packs of three votes for £1.49 within the iOS app, which could then be cast during the series semi-finals over the weekend. The problem? “Congestion” according to trade title Broadcast, meaning that some fans couldn’t cast the votes they’d paid for in advance. “We offer our sincere apologies to those who experienced these issues…Viewers will still be able to use the landline and mobile short numbers promoted in the show,” says ITV in a statement, having canned the app-voting feature for now.

ITV and FremantleMedia’s high-profile introduction of voting into their Britain’s Got Talent 2012 app appears to have flopped embarrassingly on its first night.

They worked with mobile firms MIG and Tellybug to allow people to buy virtual packs of three votes for £1.49 within the iOS app, which could then be cast during the series semi-finals over the weekend.

The problem? “Congestion” according to trade title Broadcast, meaning that some fans couldn’t cast the votes they’d paid for in advance.

“We offer our sincere apologies to those who experienced these issues…Viewers will still be able to use the landline and mobile short numbers promoted in the show,” says ITV in a statement, having canned the app-voting feature for now.

Are native apps the future for print magazines? Not according to the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, Jason Pontin. His piece on the publication’s switch from a native iPad app to HTML5 web development will make uncomfortable reading for many fellow publishers, and possibly also Apple. Check the zingers: “The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, ‘walled gardens,’ and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens,” he writes. “We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.” Oh, and: “The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.”

Are native apps the future for print magazines? Not according to the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, Jason Pontin.

His piece on the publication’s switch from a native iPad app to HTML5 web development will make uncomfortable reading for many fellow publishers, and possibly also Apple.

Check the zingers: “The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, ‘walled gardens,’ and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens,” he writes.

“We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.”

Oh, and: “The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.”