You’re 15 Minutes Too Late

By evgeniia_o

Nowadays, social media platforms are over-saturated with bloggers, making it harder for niche creators (or be it casual users) to climb this ephemeral social ladder. However, some people have no shame and are ready to go to great lengths, putting their morals and reputation on the line. I mean, keep in mind that the Internet does not forgive and does not forget…

Breast. Thigh. Personality.

When gathering material for this week’s post, I did not expect to stumble across this nugget of information — the Haagse Hogeschool and its somewhat controversial approach to answering “deep” philosophical questions[1].

To recap the incident: one of the fellow students participated in the university’s weekly rubric that was supposed to be all about showcasing life on campus, study tips, etc. But the execution of such a takeover was not so thoroughly planned out — be it by the student or the institution itself — as answers to inappropriate questions/comments left the audience looking askance. Some of the  spicy content could be paraphrased into the “Do you prefer breast or thigh?” meme. Of course, no one is safe from receiving icky questions in their ‘Ask me anything’ question box, yet there is always an option to either play along or ignore the existence of off-putting questions in their entirety.

Bad PR is Still PR

And this led me thinking. We are living in the gold rush but instead of chasing the gold (like it was once done in Silicon Valley), we are chasing far less valuable: Internet clout aka 15 minutes of fame.

The phrase “bad publicity is still publicity” is remarkably inaccurate. Negative publicity kills careers (in fact, it does it all the time). Yeah, sometimes in businesses too big to fail like Coca-Cola or Nestlé, it really does not matter as they are still going to succeed. But the same does not hold true for an individual or @dehaagsehogeschool with almost 15k followers. The following is not small but this kind of incident is what kills potential growth straight from the get-go, especially when it comes to admission. You simply do not grow by having a reputation as a student who sleeps around with other students’ moms (be it a joke or not). I mean, why would you [or the establishment] want this kind of reputation to begin with? It is a hustle for any brand to come up with apology statements later on to save their “face”:

Bound To Happen

In a way, it was inevitable. And it appears that the social media of the Haagse Hogeschool did not follow a few of the necessary steps that are usually implemented when it comes to a successful institution “takeover”[2]. For example, let’s take a look at the first (and the most) crucial rule of takeovers and, social media handling in general, that was not carried out — DO NOT GIVE DIRECT ACCESS TO THE ACCOUNT. In addition to that, the participant in the event did not send their edited/filtered photo or video content along with the caption to be approved like it is usually done. They simply did that in real time with no supervision what so ever. Yes, undoubtedly, it is more work for the social media team to weed through the files sent to them, but it helps keep the content appropriate and purposeful. An alternative to manual checks is social media management platforms (e.g. Sprout) where the content will be queued up for approval by someone on the social media team.

Of course, such a tight control runs the risk of creating material that is too scripted or too similar to what was previously shared online — this in itself goes against the role of having a takeover as by having one you want to shake up your social media, and not see more of the same. But…at the same time no one wants to give up “front-stage” as any kind of establishment is interested in projecting a certain social image for the whole world to see.

References:

[1] https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-universitys-insta-takeover-asks-ass-or-tits-question/

[2] Is an Instagram Takeover Right for Your Institution?

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This post was previously published on digmedia.lucdh with Creative Common license.

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Photo credit: Photo by Lin Zhizhao on Unsplash