The primary goal of a movie critic is not to sell movies, but to review them. Which seems like a simple enough idea, right? Apparently not simple enough for Scott Rudin and his fellow producers behind Inside Llewyn Davis, who not only took one of New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s tweets and turned it into an ad (which ran in the NYT itself), but edited out any mention of competing movies in doing so. Oof. [More]
Movie Producers Love Critic’s Tweet As An Ad… After Mention Of The Competition Is Edited Out
By 1.7.14
Patton Oswalt’s “Brand Tweets” Are Awesome, But Probably Not What Your Boss Wanted
By 12.31.13
First things first: If you don’t like naughty language (think: word for genitalia that rhymes with “clock”), you’re probably not going to want to read Patton Oswalt’s Twitter response to a company asking if he’d like to get paid for tweeting about popular brands. If you don’t mind a bit of potty talk and some rather cringeworthy topics, then you’re gonna love everything the comedian said. Because it’s relentlessly harsh and awesome and happy new year to us all. [More]
Twitter Changes Blocking Policy To Be More Stalker-Friendly, Realizes Maybe That Wasn’t A Good Idea
By 12.13.13
Yesterday, Twitter announced out of the blue that it was making a change in the way it allows users to “block” followers, effectively turning it into a mute button that allowed stalkers to keep reading and responding to your Tweets — you just wouldn’t see it. After a backlash from users who pointed out this isn’t a great idea, the company canceled that plan. [More]
Nope, It’s Still Too Soon To Use Pearl Harbor To Sell Booze And SpaghettiOs
By 12.9.13
When has enough time passed to turn a tragedy into just another day on the calendar to sell drink specials? Some marketers thought that the 72 years that have elapsed since December 7, 1941 was enough time that it’s OK to mention the anniversary in their marketing. One mention was pretty innocuous, the other…not as much. [More]
Today In How Not To Tweet: Using Mandela’s Death To Plug A Movie
By 12.5.13
South African freedom fighter and that country’s first black president Nelson Mandela passed away today at the age of 95. What better way to pay tribute to the man than by shilling for the newly released movie about his life? [More]
Ginormous Hack Targets 2 Million Accounts Spread Over 93,000 Websites Worldwide
By 12.5.13
About two million people should be checking your social media accounts and anything else one might have a login and password for: Hackers have snagged usernames and passwords for millions of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and other sites accounts, according to a new report. [More]
JPMorgan Cancels Twitter Q&A Because Everyone Was Asking Really Mean Questions
By 11.14.13
Bring out the Twitter Fail Whale — better yet, the London Fail Whale — for JPMorgan Chase. Somehow not realizing that there would be a lot of people grumpy at the big bank for the London Whale brouhaha last year, bogus credit card protection problems, billions in allegedly toxic mortgage securities and a slew of government investigations JPMorgan asked Twitter users yesterday to submit questions for a Q&A with Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee today. And boy, did people have questions — just not the ones JPMorgan wants to answer. [More]
Twitter’s New Limited Opt-in Lets Any Followers Send A User Direct Messages
By 10.17.13
You know what’s really annoying about Twitter? When super famous celebrities send you direct messages because you follow them, but then you can’t send one back saying yes, let’s be best friends, because they don’t follow you (the nerve!). But now Twitter will let you open the flood gates and release The Kraken, if you will, by letting any followers send DMs — but only on a limited amount of accounts, it seems. [More]
New York Comic Con Apologizes For Hijacking Attendees Twitter Accounts
By 10.11.13
New York Comic Con kicked off yesterday, and so have a stream of really enthusiastic Tweets about the convention like “So much pop culture to digest! Can’t. handle. the. awesome. #NYCC,” and “I can’t get enough #NYCC!” Problem is, these messages weren’t written by the owners of these Twitter accounts, but by the convention organizers. [More]
Comcast & Twitter Team Up To Help Viewers Who Don’t Know How To Find NBC On Their TVs
By 10.9.13
When someone Tweets that they’re watching The Voice and you just HAVE to see what some contestant is wearing (which is counter to the whole point of The Voice, but I digress), do you wish that you could just magically change the channel without having to fumble for your remote and then remember which of your 32,981 channels is NBC? Then the new alliance between Comcast and Twitter is apparently for you. [More]
Who Is To Blame For Creating Hashtags?
By 10.4.13
Full disclosure: I despise hashtags. They’re visually distracting and over-deployed, to the point where many Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts now look like someone got drunk and passed out on his keyboard’s number pad. Even worse, the jerks in marketing have grabbed hold of the hashtag, desperately slapping a “#” before their brand names, all for the purpose of tracking public sentiment and creating really neat-looking graphs and charts to justify spending more money on hashtag-based marketing. To misappropriate a quote from The Thin Red Line, “This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?” [More]
Guy Sasses Discount Airline EasyJet On Twitter, Gets Grounded
By 9.25.13
EasyJet is probably best known to Americans as “the European discount airline that isn’t RyanAir,” if they’ve heard of it at all. Now they’re also the airline that grounds adults for sassing them on the Internet. That’s what happened to a law professor and columnist who was annoyed that he might miss his connection when an EasyJet flight was delayed, and more annoyed that a soldier might miss his. [More]
Lexus Tweet Implies Introverts Need Fixing
By 9.19.13
While I personally tend to tip more to the side of the extrovert scale (I will talk to strangers at length but you will never find me dancing on a table in a crowded bar) I do know that a world full of only extroverts would be a terrifying existence indeed. I also recognize the importance of being happy just the way you are — introvert, extrovert or something in between — an idea that is not so obvious to whoever is behind Lexus’ Twitter account. [More]
Twitter Announces It’s Going #Public, Files For IPO
By 9.13.13
If you didn’t get in on the Facebook IPO and feel like it’s time you started making waves in the social network investment world, start busting open your piggy banks: Twitter announced last night (on Twitter, where else?) that it has filed confidential paperwork to kick off the process of an initial public offering. [More]
Now Anyone Can Go Back In Twitter Time To See What You Ate For Dinner That One Night In 2006
By 9.4.13
Imagine, if you will, Twitter’s Fail Whale. But instead of popping up to be like, “Hey, Twitter isn’t working, uh oh,” he’s swimming up to the entire catalog of tweets dating back to the long-ago beginning in 2006 and swallowing all of them in his hungry, gaping maw. The eating is good for those interested in seeing what anyone ever in the history of Twitter time has tweeted about, as one index of the social web says it’s added every public tweet ever published to its collection. [More]
Man Buys Promoted Tweet To Vent Frustration At British Airways Over Lost Luggage
By 9.3.13 — Updated: 9.8.16
Sometimes escalating a customer service issue to a manager, or sending an Executive Email Carpet Bomb just doesn’t get the message across. Times used to be, people with a bit of money to spend could take out an ad in the newspaper to vent their frustrations with a foe — but nowadays, there’s social media. That’s the route one man angry at British Airways took, by buying a promoted tweet to complain about a recent customer service fail. [More]
New York Times, Twitter, Huffington Post Hit By Hack Attack
By 8.28.13
Despite the fact that at first, I thought it was just my fault that I couldn’t get on the New York Times’ website yesterday, it turns out that the news site, as well as Twitter and the Huffington Post, all briefly lost control of some of their sites yesterday after a hit from the Syrian Electronic Army group of hackers. That’s the same bunch that struck The Onion, the Associated Press, the Washington Post and a slew more in the past. [More]
Let’s Hope Ticketmaster Exec Doesn’t Bring Extra Fees To Work With Him At Twitter
By 8.27.13
At least we can (hopefully) count on former Ticketmaster President Nathan Hubbard to eschew confusing CAPTCHAs at his new job as Twitter’s first head of commerce, but let’s all cross our fingers that he doesn’t bring Ticketmasterlike fees with him to work. Because those are the worst. Twitter has hired him in a push to allow users to shop within tweets on the social media site. [More]
