Month: September 2007

Facebook forced cartoon character to hide his nipples

Nipples and Facebook seems to be a dangerous combination these days. Today, Dagens Media writes that the Swedish tv channel Kanal5 had bought ad space on Facebook for the tv show Myggan (“the Mosquito”). The ad displays a cartoon figure with no clothes on, but he conceals his private parts with his hands. But someone tagged the ad “topless man” which meant that Facebook didn’t show the ad as many times as they had agreed to do.

Per Lorentz at Kanal5 says that Facebook suggested that the character’s nipples would be covered with small black patches, which Kanal5 agreed to do.

The uncensored cartoon character can be found here. Just outrageous, isn’t he?

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Facebook messes up in breastfeeding kerfuffle

We recently touched upon the way Facebook handles its own public relations. Now the social networking site is the target of an uproar because it deleted photos of breastfeeding users and even suspended one Canadian mother from her account after she asked why her photos had been deleted.

The Toronto Star writes:
“Last month, Facebook closed the account of an Edmonton mother who had posted breastfeeding photos and the site deleted images many others has put up, claiming they violated rules about nudity and “obscene content.” Breastfeeding advocates set up a petition group on the social networking site called “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene.” It hit the news and within days, the petition had more than 20,000 members.”

This group has now in excess of 25,000 members.

Now any company can make mistakes. But it’s how you handle those mistakes that make the difference in crisis communications. See for example how Southwestern Airlines (eventually) managed to score at least some PR points after almost throwing a female student off a plane for having a too short skirt. In the case of Facebook, blogger and columnist David Wescott took the trouble to ask Facebook about how and why they removed those photos. Read his email correspondence here. I think it’s fair to say that Facebook’s approach to PR does not include a lot of conversation, which is a bit odd for a social networking site.

[Via For Immediate Release.]

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Hiccup in Ad Age Power 150

This blog is honoured to be featured on Todd Andrlik and Advertising Age’s Power 150 – the list of the world’s top media and marketing blogs. The ranking is based on factors such as Google Page Rank, number of subscribers in Bloglines and Technorati rank. Today we’ve dropped from about #55 to #118. And if the examine the lists we can see that all sites have only gotten 1 point for Technorati rank, so there is obviously some hiccup in the way that Technorati stats are translated into ranking points. Hopefully this problem will be solved soon so that Media Culpa is back in the top 100.

Update, Oct 1: And now it seems to be working again.

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Non-UK visitors dominate UK papers’ websites

Medialife writes that foreign readers make up a large percentage of the visitors to UK newspapers’ websites. Non-UK visitors make up 66 percent of the Guardian’s online audience and 78 percent of the Daily Mail’s.

“Among the U.S. papers, NYTimes.com gets 8 percent of its monthly unique audience from overseas, or about 1.3 million visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings numbers for July, while WashingtonPost.com and USAToday.com get about 3 percent from overseas.”

Some of the reasons behind this picture, the article says, may be:
– that British papers offer a far more global perspective
– that British papers operate in a crowded home market, which forces them to offer compelling content

And just like oscarh comments on Vassa Eggen, another reason could be that the US simply is a significantly larger market than the UK and therefore naturally has more local readers.

Top 10 UK Newspaper Sites by Global Unique Audience
Ranked by % that is overseas audience

1 Financial Times 80%
2 Evening Standard 79%
3 Daily Mail 78%
4 Independent 68%
5 The Observer 67%
6 Guardian 66%
7 Telegraph 63%
8 Times 59%
9 Scotsman 55%
10 Sun 44%

And if anyone is interested, Media Culpa is up there with the Times in terms of foreign readership. 58 percent of the readers of this blog are from outside of Sweden.

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Corporate blog not the place for GM strike

One “downside” of having a corporate blog is that your customers/clients/readers etc may have gotten used to having a dialogue with your company and their expectations on your communications probably have increased. In a situation like the ongoing national strike against GM, many people would probably hope to find comments from the auto maker on one of its corporate blogs. Now, there are of course situations when it is difficult to be as open as you would wish and this appears to be one of them.

Christopher Barger, Director, GM Global Communications Technology, therefore made a short comment on the GM FastLane Blog:

“We’ve seen a number of comments coming in regarding this situation, and we appreciate the interest and opinions that you, our readers, have about this matter. But as I am sure that you can appreciate, these are sensitive times involving sensitive negotiations; a public blog is not the appropriate place for us to be commenting about them, nor do we think it’s constructive to entertain a discussion of labor issues here.

This afternoon, we issued a statement regarding the UAW’s decision; to this point, that is our only statement on the topic. Any future comments we have will be issued via press statement, and not here on FastLane. Thanks for understanding.”

Although one could always hope for more openness, at least this is a good way of managing expectations.

Via Shel Holtz.

Update: What GM does, however, is link to other blogs. For example, Trollhattan Saab is an independent blog that comments on the strike here.

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Fired via email? At least it’s not SMS

You may have read about the US consumer electronics retailer RadioShack that laid off 400 employees via email a year ago. “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated,” the ominous message supposedly read.

And it seems that this practice is not uncommon in the US as a way to avoid face-to-face conflicts. According to a survey by the Marlin Company, 10 per cent of employees say their company has used email to fire or lay off employees.

In the UK however, they do it via text message. Chelsea owner Roman Abramovitj apparently fired coach José Mourinho via SMS. What’s next, getting fired via Facebook? Maybe you should think twice before accepting that social network invitation from your boss…

Via Shel Holtz.