Exxon punked by social media microblogger
Posted in Case Studies, Commentary on August 4, 2008
In case you haven’t heard, ExxonMobil has become the latest company to have its brand hijacked by an overzealous blogger.
Someone named Janet began blogging on Twitter claiming to represent Exxon. She said the company was getting out of the gas station business and made various off-color remarks about the Valdez oil spill incident.
A description of what happened and additional fall-out is described well by industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang and social media guru Shel Holtz.
From my perspective, I concur with Holtz’s recommendations. Here are the takeaways from my perspective:
Companies need to not only monitor the social media space to know what’s being said, they need to proactively secure domains for their brands on sites like Twitter, Identi.ca and FriendFeed.
It’s naive to think this won’t happen to you. Companies should realize that with the Internet, news like this used to take weeks to make the rounds and now it happens in minutes or hours, days at the longest.
Note: I used micro.exxonmobil.com as an example in the previous comment; that service does not (yet?) exist.
I think it’s probably a good idea for major brands to establish microblogging presences under their own domain names. It’s much clearer to consumers that http://micro.exxonmobil.com/ is an official site than to determine whether an account on Twitter is a “fakester” or not.
Laconica, the software that runs Identi.ca, is Open Source and can be installed on other servers. Users of Identi.ca, or other microblogging services that support the OpenMicroBlogging spec, could subscribe to a Laconica instance at e.g. micro.exxonmobil.com and receive new messages in their inbox on their own services. Convenient and reliable, with a stress on the brand image.