22 March 2010 – the day the UK discovered tweet bombing!
Social media, when applied thoughtfully for communications purposes, can be a very useful way of putting a point across or disseminating information. However, it is important to realise that its application for these reasons is still in its infancy and, if not thought through correctly, can have some interesting, colourful, unintended and unpredictable results.
Over the weekend the UK’s main opposition Conservative Party launched a website which attempted to apply Facebook and Twitter to highlight the governing Labour Party’s close relationship with the trade union movement. “Cash Gordon”, a play on the name of the current UK Prime Minister, was in fact the result of the purchase of an off the shelf product which has also apparently been used to campaign against health care reform in the USA.
It doesn’t seem to have been tested very well. British Twitter users discovered this morning that a tweet containing a hash tag with the site’s name could be posted to its front page without moderation. Lots of high jinx ensued as the site’s popularity, Twitter rating and colourful language content soared – much to the evident amusement of the British media. Nearly all of the tweets showcased on the site lampooned it very effectively. The Conservative Party, its leading figures and policies were also subjected to some very public “satire by tweet”.
It got worse. At around lunchtime the happy tweeters discovered that, by inserting Java script into their tweets, it was possible to divert people logging onto the site to…well…whatever they fancied really. So for a while logging onto “Cash Gordon” sent web surfers in the direction of a number of sites with pornographic content, the website of the Labour Party, a video of Rick Astley singing on YouTube or displayed a pop up window containing the word “knickers”. It was at this point that the Conservative Party decided that enough was enough and the URL was re-directed to a page on its own website.
This episode seem to have been the result of a major planning lapse and a failure to realise that at least half of the audience reached by the website did not welcome what it was trying to say at all. Cue the backlash and, in the process, the UK discovered tweet bombing.
