Comments on: How to absolutely fail at social media

By: Matt Davies

Matt Davies — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:59:40 +0000

They should have simply made a change to the system and then notified and thanked failblog. Perhaps if they'd done that and asked nicely for Failblog to remove or change the offending article, we wouldn't have even heard of all this. While the original “beat this record” fail was amusing, the fallout from their response has been humiliating.

By: avidadollars

avidadollars — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:48:01 +0000

Whilst I would agree on the points in general, I think this Guinness affair is more of a case of “emotional” response you frequently find on the web. And I'm interested in the point that was raised in one of the comments there re: whether the screengrab was photoshopped.

How about interpreting that “break a record” phrase differently? Not like “break the record, blow up more people than they did on 9/11″ but – “do you know of another terrorist attack where more people were killed?”

This is the semantics and phraseology issue, and personally, I cannot hold Guinness entirely responsible. “Break this record” is clearly inserted by default, so there may be short-sightedness on the part of Guinness, but surely no bad intent. The issue with 9/11 is one of those to do with political correctness, and there is a very fine line between correctness and absurdity. FailBlog updated their entry, but did they suggest how Guinness should've rephrased “break the record” to avoid upsetting people?

By: SEOKudos

SEOKudos — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:26:11 +0000

How to absolutely fail at social media…

Kudos for a great SEO article – Trackback from SEOKudos…