
Image courtesy of bthomso
Regular (and irregular for that matter) readers will know the disdain I reserve for certain media agencies because of their insistance on choosing commission over effectiveness, of routine over insight and efficiency over engagement.
Well I think we should all take a step back and appreciate the unbridled douchebaggery that Carat Boston and Facebook have been involved in recently with the case of one Harman Bajwa. Harman, like many of us, has a Facebook vanity URL, his being http://www.facebook.com/harman.
At some point this week Harman got a friend request from a guy called Tyler Bahl on Facebook. He added him and on Friday (22nd January) he received this message from him:
Harman decided that despite the fact that it's the "GRAMMYS" on Monday, he preferred to keep his vanity URL. He did, after all get it first.
What happened next is a little sinister and if the picture is as the evidence suggests, pretty despicable. Soon after he responded to Tyler and Carat, Harman got a message on Facebook from the mothership:
Facebook told him that they were taking away his vanity URL for violating their policies because "A Facebook username should have a clear connection to one's identity". Of course his name is Harman, I mean this isn't Chris Martin trying to steal Steve Jobs' apple.
If timing is everything, then everything about this seems a little suspect ne c'est pas? It would seem that Carat tried to bribe Harman out of his vanity URL and having failed called in the heavies at Facebook to get the job done. They got what they wanted so case closed right? Not quite.
See Techcrunch got hold of the story and people commented, tweeted and shared it all over the place. Harman also set up a Facebook group to tell people about the brazen stupidity that Carat and Facebook were showing. Mark Zuckenburg, stealer..ahem..I mean founder of Facebook then joined said group (WTF?!? Is he really that stupid?!?)
Inevitably, the morons at Facebook HQ realized that Techcrunch and the Washington Post (only the 368th most visited website on Earth) were going to give this little item of soiled clothing a little more airing than they felt comfortable with (also known as "Hey!! We can't crap on everyone all the time, because sometimes people talk to each other!!"). They then flipped the switch on their damage limitation apparatus and sent this message to Techcrunch:
So all was resolved in the Kingdom of Facebook.
Apart from the fact that Harman's name is Harman, and (an Oxford comma experiment in honor of Mr. Oke and William Tweed Humphrey) apart from the fact that had Techcrunch not made such a big deal out of it, it's likely that Facebook wouldn't have moved an inch.
Facebook's dossier of dalliances in douchebaggery is ever expanding, but what of Carat Boston? Surely Tyler Bahl, a self-proclaimed emerging media strategist should have thought more about his strategy (he basically said "Give it to us or we'll get it given to us") in the emerging medium that is Facebook? In addition what does it say about Carat Boston's proficiency within social media (aside from this shining example of their excellence) that the example that Tyler quoted to Harman (twitter.com/AVTR) is an account that has tweeted a grand total of 6 times since September and follows a grand total of 0 twitter users? Some engagement. What do his colleagues say now to their counterparts at Harman International? How do they explain that as of Saturday 24 January, on the first page of a Google search for Harman International is the headline "Facebook Snatches User's Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman"? And of all the weeks to pull a stunt like this, it's days away from the GRAMMYS!
This is a classical case of a lack of awareness of the ecosystems that exist online. There are some lessons for all of us to learn from this:
- The internet is about people just as much, if not more as it is about companies. It was set up to help people communicate with each other, we were here first.
- Those of us who work in the communications business would do well to remember that we are people first and strategists/planners/whatever second. When we deal with people, we should behave like people. Not like a business card.
- You can't just crap on the little guy anymore. The little guy has a voice. It's called the internet.
- Companies and agencies should ask better questions of themselves and each other about the way they deal with people online. It's personal, in every interaction, ever tweet, every email. The standard, automated response is pretty much redundant, because you can't hide behind an envelope and letterhead and far off address anymore. We know who you are (and some of us even know where you live).
- Understanding cultural norms of behavior and context in the many tools we use and promote our clients on is absolutely crucial to our collective success.
It's a new world for everyone. Mistakes are magnified, autopsied and put back together again in front of more people than ever before. It's not easy or cheap to make every interaction worthwhile, or to own up to our mistakes. But it is more important than ever before.
(Props to Techcrunch and Tribble for their coverage of the story)

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