aka The Interwebs attack

I’ve been online in one form or another since 1978. I had an “output only” blog at ibm.com back in 1996. The one thing that has most visibly changed over that time is the attack dog that is the facebook thread, the blog comment storm, the faux outrage of people who have no real stake, no real interest, but for whom it makes them feel important by having an opinion, and better still when they can be outraged.

“Don’t read the comments!” has been the mantra for years but lately, it has been the mainstream that have become the lynch mob. Just this week here in Austin there has been a major pile-in from the mainstream local media over the name of a local PR company. Turns out the PR company chose a name with what at first appeared a hip name, that turned out to be a major historic, racial slur, refence.

I’m not going to provide links, or any other detail, it doesn’t matter what the company name was, or what the reference was to. I admit, as did a bunch of my friends, I had no idea either.

Yes, having been told, the company should have changed their name and all the steps that came with it. Eventually after the Interwebs piled in, they did change their name. Apparently, they slipped up again though, and fessed up to the new name before they secured all the relevant social media “properties” and a pretty unfunny paraody account appeared almost immediately on twitter. And then in piled the local media with commentary from people who were, for the most part working for media companies whose output, is staid at best. Sigh. You could sense they’d smelt blood and the company was theirs to web shame, to twitbomb, and did they ever.

Ever wonder how the outraged get incited? Ever wonder how these stories start, and how they get the inertia and ““go viral”? A new podcast, Startup has the scoop, on one of their own mistakes, what happened, how it came about, and how it was resolved.