The problem, however, is that the internal hierarchies of news publications are usually structured such that the people responsible for handling social media rarely have any sway over the publication’s main content. Despite their lack of editorial influence, these social media workers must perform the emotional labor of fielding any fallout that results from the publication of controversial articles, often (as in the case of the Goldberg firestorm) contending with thousands of angry messages over the course of a few hours. Though in some cases these employees may pass the complaints they receive up the chain, they remain the human buffers between an outraged public and the publication itself.
.. While coordinated Twitter assaults on politicians or private companies are often effective pressure campaigns, the outcome is less clear in the case of media institutions, which profit from page views generated by controversy while their social media personnel absorb the cost of the resulting negative feedback.
Parents: Don’t Panic About Your Kids’ Social Media Habits
Boyd argues that teenagers aren’t doing much online that’s very different from what kids did at the sock hop, the roller rink, or the mall. They do so much socializing online mostly because they have little choice, Boyd says: parents now generally consider it unsafe to let kids roam their neighborhoods unsupervised.
Riding the Hashtag in Social Media Marketing
A “play” in this context means some kind of post that pivots off the news, most likely on Facebook or Twitter. Three weeks ago, a team of employees gathered with Mr. Vaynerchuk in a conference room to discuss a brand they oversee, a cookie that the client did not want named. The team spent much of the meeting trying to figure out how this brand could exploit topics trending on Twitter. They call it “riding the hashtag” here.
.. One of his favorite lines is “marketers ruin everything.” What he means is that marketers take methods that work and then beat consumers with them until numbness sets in, at which point the methods stop working. He proved this adage at Wine Library, he will acknowledge, by sending emails to a list of customers — first one day a week, then every weekday, then on Saturdays, too. Yields plunged, especially as competitors jumped in and emailed to excess right along with him.