Bad Science, Gillian McKeith and a PR disaster – another lesson in how not to use social media

As a growing list of public figures are learning through harsh experience, the days of foolproof reputation management are over. It’s become clear that with an unmonitored voice through the medium of Twitter, the smallest misjudgment by a well-known name is done in dangerously full view of the public, with often far reaching consequences.

The latest to fall foul of the tweeter’s first rule  - think before you type - is self-styled holistic health guru Gillian McKeith. For those unfamiliar with her work, McKeith is a prime time TV celebrity and successful author who has made a name for herself advising the overweight, under-exercised and nutritionally challenged. Her herbal supplements, cereal bars and powders are sold in health food shops throughout the country, and it is the questionable claims made about these products that first brought her to the attention of Ben Goldacre: a London-based science journalist on a mission to expose bad science in whatever forms it might take. Goldacre has had McKeith firmly in his sights for a while and his book, the aptly named Bad Science, devotes a chapter to a detailed challenge to her scientific credibility.

So persistent has been his campaign to expose McKeith, that in 2007 a reader of Goldacre’s blog (www.badscience.net) complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about McKeith’s use of the title ‘Doctor’, as her PhD was obtained via a correspondence course from the non-accredited and now obsolete American Holistic College of Nutrition in Birmingham, Alabama. Having been strongly positioned by Channel Four as ‘Dr Gillian McKeith, Clinical Nutritionist’ her star somewhat fell when it became clear that her certified membership of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants was essentially meaningless, as demonstrated by her old adversary Goldacre buying the same membership online for his dead cat for $60.

Last week’s adventures began innocently, with a woman called Rachel Moody tweeting that she was about to start reading the McKeith chapter from Bad Science. Her remark triggered a series of angry reply tweets from McKeith, accusing Goldacre of being a liar and Moody of being anti-American, in reference to criticism of McKeith’s PhD qualification.

 
Being new to Twitter and perhaps realizing the seriousness of her accusations McKeith then deleted the tweets, unaware that nothing can ever truly be erased from the internet – not least because there are those among us with the foresight to take screen shots of such salacious events as they unfold  (the one above comes via http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/gillian_mckeith_does_not_have.php.)

There then followed another series of tweets written in the third person, as if to suggest that someone other than McKeith was at the controls. Those tweets were then also deleted. Finally, and most bizarrely, the last tweet, which remains to this day: “Do you actually believe this is real twitter site for the GM (sic)?” Sadly the answer is a definite yes, as the Twitter feed was linked to her official website and Facebook accounts. Those links have since also been removed, seemingly in an effort to leave no trace of this unpleasant and potentially damaging episode.

Goldacre’s potential libel case against McKeith is a very real possibility, but in the meantime he has offered to discuss directly any concerns about his accusations via an unedited podcast. No response so far. And the flurry of activity on @gillianmckeith seems also to have ground to a halt, the final word from 14th July being ‘the moral of the story: Love your neighbour and your enemies too’.

One other moral that Gillian should bear in mind – use Twitter with care.

To find out how GraceDigi can help your brand to use social media to its advantage, email makesomenoise@graceagency.co.uk

Social media – a life-saver

We all know people who continually denigrate social media in all its forms, but perhaps the channel that comes in for the greatest criticism is Twitter. People generally fall into two very distinct camps: those who Tweet and those who voice strong opinions along the lines of “But I just don’t get the point – who wants to know what so and so is doing right now?”

There’s also a pretty big middle ground of floaters, many of whom have dabbled but then lost interest. I too was one of those until at the third ‘dabble’ it finally clicked and now I’m hooked.

But perhaps now there is a story that can answer the gainsayers when they shout “What’s the point?”

The recent transport chaos caused by the volcanic ash cloud left a courier carrying vital bone marrow stranded in Brussels. The following tweet was retweeted over a thousand times and did the trick:

AnthonyNolan URGENT! Our courier stuck in Brussels carrying marrow. Needs 2 get on Eurostar/tunnel from 8pm UK time 2nyt. Can u help? Call 07710 599 161”

The result was reported extensively in the press(See Article). So instead of too many tweets making a t**t, according to an inane comment from our new PM, you could say that so many tweets save a life, which I think is far more worthy (and accurate) message.

New website leaves anonymity Unvarnished

The online marketplace is the ideal platform for an individual to make their opinions heard.  There are quite literally millions of websites that will allow one to comment or debate or review any genre of subject matter from music and film to politics and healthcare.  There has been a lot of assessment as to why the Internet, particularly the successful growth of social media, has been such a powerful tool for discussion. One particular weapon in the social media arsenal that everyone seems to agree on is the importance of anonymity.  However, the latest platform to pass through private beta testing may have taken the significance of being anonymous one step too far.

The site, named Unvarnished has been created for one purpose, to rate professionals in the workplace – for better or for worse.  The founders have an impressive CV of social networking sites, notably LinkedIn and eBay, and yet Unvarnished may be the most controversial to date.  One co-founder, Peter Kazanjy is quoted as saying that they are “trying to take how professional opinion works in the offline world and port that online”.  Essentially, this is how it works:  One can log into Unvarnished through Facebook and either create a profile about your coworker, or if one already exists, add comments, ratings and a description of your issue.  The individual ‘reviewing’ will have their name kept completely secret, ultimately meaning that no matter what you say about a colleague, they will never know it is you.

The website will allow an individual to rate your doctor, your IT guy or your boss without ever revealing your identity.  When asked about the risks of anonymity to this extent, Kazanjy answered that without it; people couldn’t be “candid or nuanced in their reviews”.  However, it certainly opens up the situation to potential abuse and misuse.  The situation could quite easily arise where an individual feels put out, overworked or mistreated by their boss, and now they can take it out anonymously on his or her Unvarnished page with little to no chance that they’ll ever be caught.  However, there is potentially a very real and very destructive chance it could ruin your boss’s professional reputation.

Kazanjy says Unvarnished has controls in the system to prevent “trashing” and all users must “authenticate” their profile through Facebook, meaning the company will have actual names and personal details in case of potential ‘spammers’.  To use the system, individuals must be 21 and over, and there is a ‘report’ button to allow abusive comments to be reported and removed if needed.  There is a sort of ‘rewards system’ on offer as well, where the individual user can gain ‘authority’ based on the perceived helpfulness of their comments.  Although an individual user cannot remove a comment on their profile themselves there is a ‘respond’ button that allows you to give your side of the story.

There is however a great deal of apprehension towards this new system.  Whether this hesitancy is because many of us fear the website will be misused is debatable.  It seems more likely that individuals are apprehensive of Unvarnished because they don’t want to be criticized for what they do.  However, Kazanjy himself certainly makes a good point when he says “If someone has an axe to grind, they can already make a smear campaign behind your back, it already happens in the online world every day”.

Social networking is still growing and seems not to be slowing down.  People keep tumbling, flickering and tweeting more and more and it seems Unvarnished may be the next significant addition to the marketplace.  Where anonymity may be key to its success, there is certainly an argument against Unvarnished’s potential overuse of it.  Reviewing your colleagues is certainly an exciting prospect and at the moment we’ll have to wait and see whether it really takes off.  One thing is for sure however, nobody likes a bad review, so you better get back to work!

Sugar Rush, or just Plain Stupid?

It seems Nestle have fallen victim to the ‘anti-social media’ bug recently and now faces a public relations disaster because of their appalling handling of their Facebook fan page.   These pages are now deemed a necessity for almost any company, and more often than not are a great way to keep in contact with their ‘fans’.  However, Nestle have shown how not to do it!

Environmentalist group Greenpeace have long been putting pressure on Nestle to stop them using palm oil in their products.  Through social media, they have released documents, pictures and a particularly provocative viral on Youtube.  Be warned, the video is quite nauseating: http://bit.ly/aSZbIu

At the time of its release, Nestle lobbied to have the video removed, citing a copyright complaint.  All this resulted in was plenty of free, powerful press for Greenpeace.  The world of social media is notoriously anti-establishment in its nature, a company like Nestle should therefore have learned from their mistakes.  But they didn’t, they made it even worse for themselves.

Greenpeace had encouraged their supporters to change their profile pictures to anti-nestle slogans, often incorporating their food logos and then post their comments on the fan page.  This simple, ‘digital flash mob’ style protest about the destruction of the rainforest and deaths of orangutans should have been a bread and butter corporate PR hush up, but whoever handled the situation got it very wrong.  

Upon reading posts such as the following:

Nestle responded with this statement on their fan page wall:

Cue a social media uproar! They foolishly made the mistake of telling people what not to do.  Whoever was in charge of this obviously did not think thoroughly about what they were saying.  If there is one thing social media users like, it is free speech, challenging it was like provoking an angry lion.  Yet they didn't stop there.  It seems as though the person in charge of their social media thought it was a good idea to wind people up even further.  The following screen grab is perhaps the best example of their ridiculous handling of the situation.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear oh dear.  Big mistake.  The fallout has seen Nestle been forced to make a public apology, stating: "This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise.  And for being rude.  We've stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude."

We - Grace DR - are not here to pass judgment on the rights and wrongs of the Nestle products, but we did find ourselves incredulous at the naivety they've shown in handling the situation.  The incident is an excellent demonstration of how powerful social media can be as a negative.  It is apparent that companies must understand that with such an open forum and such a public medium they will get negative content, not just positive.  The trick to using social media effectively is accepting that fact and handling it in the correct fashion, something Nestle have clearly failed to understand.
 

The GDR Retweet Challenge Review

We recently launched our Retweet Challenge for Sport Relief.  As well as raising money for charity, our aim was to demonstrate the power of Twitter and its huge potential within the pharmaceutical world. Here’s how we did it.

We launched our first ‘tweet’ at 2pm on Tuesday 16th March with the words; “The Grace Digital Relations Retweet Challenge: Exercise your thumbs for Sport Relief here: http://is.gd/aSM6i please RT.”  This link took visitors to a simple landing page that pledged a penny a click donation, made by Grace DR to Sport Relief.

By the end of the first day, 358 people had visited the link.  Wanting to exploit the growing volume of traffic, we added a Twitter 'follow us' button to the landing page and by the end of the day, our following doubled.  We also gave a link to Sport Relief itself and showed a constant counter of the donation amount.

The next day we released variously worded tweets, reminding our followers of the purpose of the challenge and by the end of Wednesday, numbers had reached an impressive 732 unique visitors.  

As the week progressed and Sport Relief increasingly dominated TV and airwaves, things really took off on Twitter.  At 10.15am on Thursday, BBC Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills ‘retweeted’ our link to his 96,234 followers.  The ‘Mills Effect’ meant that by the end of the day we had added an incredible 29,894 visitors to our site. 

From that one tweet, we later managed to attract the attention of other high-profile tweeters including Emma Freud, Chris Evans, Lorraine Kelly, Simon Mayo, Kirstie Allsopp and Claudia Winkleman.  The following day – Friday – another 32,513 people clicked through to our site. 

At the time of writing this article (just 8 days since our first tweet) we have seen a combined total of 86,195 visitors click on our link.  That is £861.95 accumulated for Sport Relief, in just 7 days. Which we doubled for the sake of charity.  Below is the final donation page, which we're really proud of.

And we only launched our campaign on Twitter.

Just think what that sort of power could potentially do for your product.

Imagine what would be possible if you made more of what social media has to offer. 

Consider the facts:

If Facebook were a country it would have the world’s 4th largest population between the United States and Indonesia.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.

The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube, expected to be number one in 6 months.

There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% of them are updated daily. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.

78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  Only 14% trust advertisements.

The Retweet Challenge gives an insight into the power of social media.  Why not let us help you harness that power for one of your brands?

Written by Chris Wilson (@clutterances) 

Thank you to Erik Qualman (@equalman) for the statistics