UK National Lottery's Twitter PR Disaster | Hacker News Reader

UK National Lottery's Twitter PR Disaster

bbc.co.uk

54 pointssjcsjc42 comments

Ah, this brings back memories of an adidas campaign I worked on for the Stan Smith launch in the UK. I had a backend that would automatically generate an image from a given tweet [1] but we were mindful of this exact sort of problem so built a whole CMS around it to allow a social media manager to automatically tweet back from the official adidas account. It would include their stylised label and various auto-populated messages they could edit if they liked.

All works well until the evening shift comes on based outside of the UK and they end up sending out a tweet [2] with a picture of Dr Harold Shipman - a notorious serial killer [3].

[1] https://twitter.com/adidasuk/status/422704045229219840

[2] https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/517511/evil-harold-sh...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman

Yep, I worked on a website for a very popular British girl band almost ten years ago. The target demographic was teenage girls, and one of the requested features was to embed a Twitter feed showing a particular hashtag on the homepage to promote their album launch.

The client thought it would be quick and simple because Twitter supplies that kind of thing as one line of code, however since it was pulling directly from Twitter in the browser, there was no opportunity to moderate if we did it that way. We pointed this out, with the consequences, several times, and strongly recommended that we pull it server-side so we could provide moderation, but this took extra time and money, so the client ignored us.

Fast forward to the site / album launch, and sure enough, right in the middle of the big publicity campaign, some bright spark decided to tweet altered obscene song lyrics describing in graphic detail what he wanted to do to the girl band members, using the hashtag so it would show up on the website viewed by all those teenage girls.

This kind of thing is entirely predictable, but the people in charge of these things are often inexperienced, overworked, and inattentive. Couple that with somebody telling them that it's going to cost more and take longer to do it properly, and they are going to go with the quicker, cheaper option unless they've been burnt by this before.

That's pretty special - and the whole thing reminds me of a rather more minor snafu with social media a client had.

My business built and operated an ecommerce platform. At one point we added a feature that would allow retailers to populate content areas with images from twitter and instagram - they'd just pop in a hashtag, images matching that tag would flow into the CMS, and they could then choose which to publish.

So far, so good. Users are tweeting product shots, retailers are semi-automatically populating their sites with them.

Along comes a client - who is running a very successful campaign with it - but they're struggling to find the time to moderate everything, can we please make it auto-publish. We warn them of the probable abusive outcomes, but they aren't having any of it - they say that they'll reactively moderate. We acquiesce, but only after getting them to sign a release that essentially says "we warned you".

It goes live, after having languished in staging for a month where the client adamantly refuses to test it. "We'll test it live, we'll just set a hashtag on the main homepage module, and we'll see it working."

We know the change to autopublish has been tiny (a single additional setting toggle) and safe, so aren't too perturbed by this all too usual behaviour this time.

Twenty minutes after it launches the client's MD (this is a £100M brand) phones, frothing and panicking that the site had been hacked and was full of porn. A glance at their usually clothing filled homepage reveals an alarming amount of flesh. At this point I'm almost impressed that they've been attacked so quickly, so hop into their CMS to do a bulk delete for them - when I start crying with laughter, for what have they chosen as their test hashtag? Only #xxx.

How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright? "Scrape random images off the internet without the site's or the user's consent and upload them to a website for commercial purposes" doesn't exactly sound legal to me.

> How was that feature supposed to work concerning copyright?

Somewhere between "Better to ask forgiveness than to get permission" and "Fuck it, we'll do it live!"

You know, the usual response to copyright laws on the Internet.

As an addendum, a nontrivial number of people think copyright laws are about plagiarism:

http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/

(Copyright laws have nothing to do with plagiarism. Acknowledging whose copyright you violated does nothing to help you. Plagiarizing without directly copying is likely legal.)

The idea was that their customers would tweet a hashtag linked to that campaign/product, and would be willingly contributing content as per the t's & c's of the contest/promo/site.

Don't they know the only valid test string for this kind of thing is #asdfasdfasdf

Why won't people learn that creating a twitter bot when its attached to a large corporation will create a PR disaster ?

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/14/technology/progressive-tweet...

It's not necessarily a Twitter bot - it's any project on any platform that broadcasts user-generated content out without vetting.

"Yer da sells Avon" is definitely my favourite regional insult.

And it means "Your dad sells Avon", Avon being a door-to-door selling multi-level-marketing makeup brand.

Amway is the American equivalent

Avon is quite prevalent in the US as well.

Yeah doesn't the mother in Edward Scissorhands sell Avon?

Aye

Except Avon is predominantly sold by women ("Avon Ladies"), so there's a "your da's a lass" in there too.

I always find it interesting that although Americans and Brits share the same language, our humor is so divergent.

There's plenty of divergence within the UK. This particular insult is only known outside of Scotland because of Twitter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/scottishpeopletwitter/comments/5m7i...

Bit of a stretch to say it's only down to Twitter.

I take it you have never been to Northern Ireland.

Well, I've never been insulted by a Northern Irish 8 year-old!

Can you explain this one please?

Basically it means "your dad sells Avon". Avon is a cosmetics brand distributed by an army of (usually female) representatives.

Suggesting that someone's father has such a non-masculine job as delivering nail polish is so childish and stupid that it's funny.

I found a video on YouTube when I googled for it, that was kind of homophobic. Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad".

> Let's just say "Da" is short for "Dad".

Wait, would you really not cop that right away?

"Da" is not common in the US. If I saw it on its own, I would almost certainly assume it was the Russian word for "yes" before I drew connection to "Dad". Most people still say "Dad" without dropping the ending, or "Pa" if they were raised by heathens.

Also, when I first saw the image, I read it as "Yerda", which I assumed to be something like a female given name of some sort of Scandivanian origin.

I don't think it's homophobic but it's definitely sexist.

I'm only sort-of aware of the background on this one, so bear with me:

Avon is a brand of cosmetics being sold door-to-door, so it became a favorite of many transvestites in the UK, many becoming Avon salespeople themselves.

So "Yer da sells Avon" could also be meant to imply "your dad is a transvestite".

I’ve been working with a US based ad agency recently, who asked about some features a bit like this.

I’ve had to educate them on this idea with the fact that if you give the internet a ‘pen’, sooner rather than later, they’ll draw a cartoon penis.

Would be interesting to know if some these snafus actually turned out to be disasters.

Yes, it's certainly moment of embarrassment for the PR crew, but it might be that public forgets the actual thing and the brand just got visibility.

Sounds like a phenomenal success, then.

Yeah, I think such social media "failures" has long since become a canned recipe for generating free media hype. It allows brands to tap into obscene words and imagery by proxy ("we didn't know") - but gets lots of press and organic traffic as people make anything from meme jokes to hate speech.

Case in point: the UK national lottery just reached whatever fraction of hn users that are possible customers, probably nudging a few percent of those to remember to buy lottery tickets.

Good point. There's also Susan Boyle's album launch that was promoted with the hashtag #susanalbumparty that was a stroke of genius.

And this, dear reader is why you always sanitise user inputs. Be it a twitter bot dealing with the unwashed masses, or a simple form...

Things brings back memories of the fun we had when Skittles handed their website over to the internet. http://www.alphr.com/news/internet/248726/new-skittles-twitt...

PR disaster?

What bullshit.

Do the morons behind the headline really think people will boycott the product now because of a mistake?

Or is the BBC now giving out free advertising for a product?

Come on sheeple.

And yes it is sheeple to believe that the BBC believe their headline was also true. They know it's no PR disaster but it gets them clicks.

You were making a great point until you dropped sheeple in there.

After Microsoft learned this lesson with "Tay" I'm surprised companies are still making this mistake. Also, "hijacked" seems like the wrong word. More accurate would be "misused".

This is a mistake all marketing people will make (hopefully just once but we all know that won't be the case).

The worrying thing is that the last similar social media fail was less than 3 months ago with Walkers Crisps showing various photos of mass murderers..

In which the social media offense economy has both supply and demand

This is the reason why you need Managers with a CS degree and not an MBA.

MBAs do stupid shit all the time.

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