One challenge is the “amplified effect” of social media, said Ian Schafer, chief executive at Deep Focus, a digital agency in New York, citing how, on Twitter, “you put something out and it can be retweeted thousands of times.”
“It’s an age when anybody can communicate to an audience,” he added. “It didn’t used to be that way.”
The relative newness of that phenomenon, said George E. Belch, a marketing professor at San Diego State University, means “there are people in your company who forget when they post on a blog, on Twitter, on a Facebook page, that it’s out there — and it’s out there at warp speed.”
Aflac and Chrysler, Turning to Social Media, Hit Trouble – NYTimes.com
These comments that open the NY Times article are delightfully naive. It is difficult to remember the uneven, perhaps lumpy, distribution of experience with emerging tools and media and the consequences that follow. Corporate brand managers would rather not associate themselves with snark, but the snarkiest and least appropriate get the most attention. Maybe there is a Machiavellian, Barnum-esque dynamic at play – there is no “bad” publicity; and, spokespeople have a parachute clause that rewards them for crossing a line that brings outrage.