The Importance of Being Honest on Social Media / Sky Movies HD GOOD, Campari VERY VERY VERY BAD.

“There’s only two people in your life you should lie to… the police and your girlfriend.”

Jack Nicholson

There are two simple rules brands must follow when a customer asks a question on any social network:

-       be honest

-       don’t be dishonest

Easy. But let’s start with a Freudian analysis.

Young children ask an average 4,566 questions a day. “Why this?”, “Why that?” and so on. Now, unless you are a heartless loveless and soulless being, you will try to answer at least to half of the questions. In this phase, two types of parents can be seen: the ones who try to come up with the right answer, and the ones who just come up with something – a half-truth, a lie, a who-cares-she-is-gonna-forget-about-this-anyway, a complicated half-lie which doesn’t really help and makes things look even more intricate, a whole plain big load of bulls**t and other countless ways to avoid that sad “Daddy doesn’t know (and doesn’t have an Internet connection), sweetheart…”

If you do it in the privacy of your own home, you’ll have to justify your behavior to your wife and kids, but if you are a brand on social media, your lies are likely to be exposed to millions, and eventually collect comments and reactions that won’t help your reputation.

Case 1 / Sky Movies HD

I believe trolling can be a useful and interesting activity, from a sociological point of you. Provoke someone, and see what happens. Action / reaction. Some brands are good dealing with that, some are bad, some are honest.

Some time ago I was listening to some music on Spotify. As I am a cheap person, I still use the free account, which means you have a limited amount of features, and every three songs there is someone trying to sell you something, with a cheesy ad.

So I decided to complain on Sky Movies HD’s Facebook page.

Here’s the reply. I quite like it.

Case 2 / Campari

The guys at Campari describe themselves as the skippers of “uniqueness”. It doesn’t seem so in the following post, in which a young lady pointed out the image is surprisingly similar to another brand’s JPEG.

Here’s the original, from Molinari Sambuca Italia:

And here’s the rip-off:

What do they do after she left the comment? They hide it from the page.

She finds out, and tell the guys “You hid my comment?? double #faillllllllllllll”. After a little while, the comment magically reappeared, with this reply: “Hi ____, our apologies, for some reason your link triggered our spam filter and hid your comment automatically. In response to your comment: we did not intentionally create a similar post, what can we say? Great minds think alike! J”

Now, if that is not a big, fat, shameless, impudent, cheap, insolent, brazen, blatant lie, then I am Diego Armando Maradona.

What do you think?

London Web Agency Appnova – keep following us on Twitter @appnova and “like” us on Facebook for useful news and tasteful digressions about geeky stuff.