Lies, Chipotle & Twitter

Insight Advertising, Marketing & Communications has been a Twitter user for...years @InsightADV is for our agency as well as for Insight on Business - The News Hour.  We're not new to the world of social media and the tricks brands and bots can play on Twitter.  Often folks like to pick at various issues and suggest that Twitter is DOA.

Recently Molly McHugh wrote a piece for Digital Trends, "Chipotle, The Product of a System: Lying, Liers, and the Nature of Ambition". In it she writes about the "self-hacking" effort Chipotle did in the hope of drawing more followers to their feed.  It's been done before and no doubt will again.

What we thought was interesting was what she said about Twitter being like "high school": "Twitter is also a lot like a gossipy, cruel high school classroom full of cheaters, liars and manipulators."  Seriously Molly?

We find Twitter to be an excellent news tool and while there are "cheaters, liars and manipulators" within its ranks that does not take away from the value it presents.  Frankly, Molly sounds more like a disgruntled CEO who distrusts new media and waves it off as a waste of time.

Our recommendation to business is that you build your reputation and your customer base on being open and honest.  Twitter is a fantastic way in which you can do just that.  The Chipotle incident can be, we think, explained away as what a sophomoric person thought was funny, cute or ground-breaking and it was just...dumb.  And...there is plenty of that to go around in the non-digital world as well.

 

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