On tragedy, and the marketing urge

[lagilman]

Discussion on Twitter (again) about the ..appropriateness? morality? of doing promotional tweets/posts during a time of immediate crisis.

(apologies for the US-centric nature of this discussion, but those are the three recent datapoints we have were within the US).

During the Boston bombing, and the Newton shooting, people had strong, negative reactions to promotional blitzes, especially ones that clearly seemed preprogrammed/scheduled, with an inappropriately cheerful tone.

Today, as we're watching news come in from the terrible tornado activity in Oklahoma, there didn't seem to be that same backlash against promotion, or if it was it was considerably muted.

So the question rises... when is it offensive? When is it all right? So far, the dividing elements seem to be man-made vs Nature, preventable versus inevitable-if-terrible.

What do y'all think? Is there a time when marketing/promotion is out of place in the social media? Where do you draw the line, and why?



[I remember after 9/11 pretty much every publishing PR bit was yanked, to the understandable dismay of the authors that month. But that was before much of the current marketing 'net network.... I -think- it was the same during Katrina?]

Comments

[autojim.livejournal.com]

I'm not thrilled with it now, either. Part of the reaction from the coast-based news organizations, though, comes across to this Oklahoma native as "It's May. It's Oklahoma. They have tornadoes in Oklahoma in May. And besides, it's *just* Oklahoma." The fact that it's been 3 days of storms (so far) in the same general area is also a factor: by day 2, it's not news anymore. I've seen reports this afternoon from some of the national news organizations that conflate Saturday's outbreak (and particularly the big one in Shawnee), Sunday's outbreak (including the big one in Edmond), and today's in Newcastle & Moore & OKC into one event that happened in one place. Nope. Not even remotely accurate.

As far as promoted tweets and glib pushed ads on FB and things like that, a lot of the folks doing THAT are coast-based and the stuff that happens in flyover country doesn't even ping their radar in the slightest. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in general, and the people who live or have family there aren't their target audience. It's *just* Oklahoma. The Thunder are out of the NBA playoffs, so everyone can go back to ignoring its existence.

[lagilman]

As far as promoted tweets and glib pushed ads on FB and things like that, a lot of the folks doing THAT are coast-based and the stuff that happens in flyover country doesn't even ping their radar in the slightest.

Wow. Way to dismiss the midwest-based writers who are promoting their stuff, too, Jim. Or do you think that writers and musicians and artists only live on the coasts?

[autojim.livejournal.com]

Laura Anne, the corporate ad machine is largely coast-based, even if the authors themselves are not.

And yeah, being someone from that part of the world myself (I spent part of the afternoon on the phone tracking down relatives and friends in the effected part of the OKC metro), it's very, sometimes painfully, obvious that the coast-based media machines pay scant attention to goings on in the middle of the country -- the middle didn't coin the term "flyover country", after all -- because it's not LA or NYC or Miami or Boston or Seattle. Chicago and sometimes Houston and the DFW area are grudgingly accepted because of their size.

I realize that people in various businesses advertise to promote and keep their businesses working, and that's okay. Where I draw the line is clueless marketing that isn't paying attention to what's going on in the world -- such as the fashion house that thought Aurora trending on Twitter was about their new line of that name, not the theater shooting that was, in fact, the reason. Those folks deserve to have the internet fall on their heads.

A lot of the social-based push marketing is still in its infancy, and people are still trying to sort out what's appropriate and what isn't. I guess my main thing is to just pay attention. If there's a tragic natural disaster, pushing your post-apocalyptic survival fantasy book/show/movie maybe can wait just a little bit. Ditto your feel-good RomCom's overly perky ad blitz. Or your Clancy-esque thriller after a terror attack. Think first, pull trigger on ad after.

[lagilman]

Please note that I did not say ADVERTISING but PROMOTION. And the world of Twitter promotion is mostly independent/indie-driven. Major corporations may buy promoted tweets, but they're a minority, still. So my comment holds: a lot of the folk who were tweeting their contests and sales were NOT from the elitist, selfish coastlines or major cities.

But. Leaving that aside.

Aare agreeing or disagreeing that pre-scheduled tweets should be pulled? Or only if it might offend, and some promotion is okay?

[autojim.livejournal.com]

If the subject of the promotion is likely to be a trigger related to the major bad event of the moment, then yes, I would agree that those promoted or scheduled tweets should be pulled, or at least delayed, yes.

Where the subject isn't likely to be a trigger, I probably wouldn't be terribly upset by it, but I can see some readers being offended regardless. There's just no way to avoid that, but when one is serving a global audience, local events can't paralyze the entire world.

My experience with promoted tweets is that easily 99%-plus of the ones that come across my tweetstream are corporate. Amanda Palmer is a notable exception. Usually what I do is report the corporate ones for spam before dismissing if I'm at my computer.

Individual authors or artists running promotional contests (ARCs, signed CDs, Tuckerizations, etc.), promoting appearances or shows, etc. don't tend to buy promoted tweets, though they may well schedule tweets or FB posts to catch people in different time zones, and that sort of thing generally doesn't bother me at all: it's something I've chosen to receive by following that author, artist, musician, or whoever. That said, I have an additional appreciation for the folks who are paying attention and restructure their promotions (say, adding a Red Cross contribution element) to acknowledge the event(s) that have taken place.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

I shrug off or breeze past the pre-scheduled tweets. To me, being upset about them would be akin to cursing commercials during a newscast. The commercials don't really matter.

But I do note those who seem completely unaware of the crisis in non-scheduled posts/tweets.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

The overwhelming majority of the US population lives within 50 miles of coastline. The interior areas have a very much smaller share of the population.

9/11, the Patriots' Day bombings, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Newtown Massacre, were all human-caused atrocities. The Patriots' Day bombings went off with hundreds of thousands of people in the vicinity, on live broadcast, on a clear had-been-gorgeous-out day. Likewise, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Newtown massace, the mass shootings at University of Virgina was it, and other human-caused atrocities, were to the public "bolt out of the blue" terror-induding attacks--and the fears included "how many more people are going to die from uncaught associates, or copycat nihilists?" Earthquakes, horrendous car pileups with dead and many injured, the railroad crash in Connecticut within the past three days, those have the perception of being less scary because they're less unexpected in the aggregate, and more "ordinary" day to day hazards.

Another factor might be Sen Inhofe and his fellow Senate colleague from Oklahoma, who argued and voted against funding FEMA disaster relief on the US east coast for the hurricane back in the fall, and apparently more generally any FEMA activities or assistance for non-red states.... My feeling is their campaign contributors should foot the bills for disaster relief in Oklahoma, not the rest of the USA who Inhofe and his colleague have forced funds sequestration on and blocked or limited disaster aid to--or divert the funds from military programs and agriculture payments and federal perks to the oil business in Oklahoma, to diaster relief instead.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

A tad over 50% of the US population lives within 50 miles of the coast.

I can promise you that communities struck by earthquakes and storms do not consider them ordinary and day-to-day just because they weren't human-caused. The parents in Moore will mourn no less than the parents in Newton, though I do understand the majority of the country won't be interested in Moore for long because it has a short political storyline.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

The cities along the Great Lakes on are on international bodies of water.

I'm angry at the state of Oklahoma for electing the likes of Sen Inhofe and at least three other members of Congress who helped impose the federal budget sequester which is defunding children from federal programs, closing down the MIT fusion research program, furloughing federal workers; who voted against funding FEMA and against funding disaster aid to the victims of Hurricane Sandy, but protected federal perks to the oil industry and big business farming operations and farm owners--oh, and "the Monsanto Protection Act."

I don't wish disaster upon the state of Oklahoma. On the other hand, the fortune that the Koch brothers, etc., and politically activist churches and pastors and parishoners spent contributing to Inhofe etc. election/re-election campaigns, is money which would be better spent on disaster remediation in Oklahoma, than the income of taxpayers in the rest of the country who are suffering from natural disasters and Inhofe-etc. cuts to the federal budget and whom Inhofe etc. balked at providing any diaster relief funding and operations to, and federal spending in their states otherwise.

[lagilman]

Getting off-topic, here...

(I share your anger, but at least TRY to answer the question, too? *g*)

[paulliver.livejournal.com]

I think people need to remember that most ad campaigns are planned out weeks, if not months, in advance. Joss Whedon delayed the broadcast of a Buffy episode because it was too close to a tradegy that just happened to occur the same week it was scheduled to air.

[bentleywg.livejournal.com]

Mostly when I read about outrage it's not about the pre-scheduled tweets but rather about the tweaked or new tweets that are deliberately linked to the tragedy.