Drew B's take on tech PR

Starbucks' Facebook hijack

Starbucks owns one of the biggest pages on Facebook. It has over 7.4 million fans (or Likes as it's now known) and with that comes one heck of an online community management job. 

We do a lot of community management here at 33 Digital, and we know as well as any that the community is not always 'on-message'. Whilst some online platforms enable moderation, Facebook is one that does not. 

At about 7pm UK time this evening, Starbucks' Facebook page was overcome with a wave of foul mouthed wall posts. Some sort of online petition, aimed at the coffee company, took some time to bring under control. Several posts when I looked said 'f**k Israel' a hundred times or more. I have a screen grab but posting it here wouldn't add much more to what I've just described other than lowering the tone. 

It seemed to take a couple of hours for Starbucks to get rid of the mess (with some Twitter posts wondering how it happened). I've posted some of the stream below. Some say it was a hack, others that Starbucks is just a highly visible platform for an online protest. Either way, it shows how easy a target an open social network page is for an online movement of any kind, and the close management that is needed. 

 

 

Google publishes the top 1000 most visited websites. Top 5: Facebook, Yahoo, Live, Wikipedia, MSN

Google's Doubleckick Adplanner has published its April top 1,000 most visited sites on the net. Essential reading for anyone needing to know their way around. There are some surprises there, and not only for learner drivers. 

The top dog: Facebook has 540m uniques, 570bn page views, and a 35% reach. Some interesting sites in the top 15: China... QQ (a mix of Twitter and IM), Baidu (search) and 163.com (news). Also interesting to see Google's blogging platform Blogspot up there. 

Here's the top 15 below, and click here for the full top 1,000.

  

links for 2010-05-20

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The game in numbers: 154 Foursquare check-ins for Man City vs Spurs Premiership match

This evening a UK Premiership football match is taking place right now between Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspurs. Tipped as 'the biggest game in both clubs histories' the brands behind the scenes have been looking for hot ways to engage the audience. 

Man City sponsor Umbro posted on to its blog yesterday a call to social media arms - everyone at the sell-out match who is on Foursquare, check-in and try to break the current record for number of consecutive check-ins on the social network. "Anyone on Foursquare? Check in at City's final home game" the blog said. By their reckoning a few hundred check-ins would break the Foursquare record. 

It's not happened just yet - here are the numbers:  

58 - Number of check-ins to date at the City of Manchester Stadium before the match started

212 - Number of check-ins to date as of 9:45pm GMT (that's full-time)

154 - Total number of check-ins for today's match

...And I'll keep watching...