Social media Monday: Moderating Britney

An article on econsultancy.com posits that There’s no such thing as “cruise control” with social media.

Unnecessary quotation marks aside, I agree with the headline’s statement.

It uses Britney Spears’s Facebook fan page as a case study. Apparently its Photos from Others section is full of images advertising hardcore porn. The article says that her people should spend a few minutes each day deleting them. Good so far.

But towards its end, article claims ‘[w]hile it may be difficult to quantify what Spears is ‘losing’ by not removing the photos… it doesn’t take much more than common sense to see the wisdom in making sure this gets done.’

Apart from some more unnecessary quotes combined with unnecessary italics, I have a couple of problems with this statement.

First of all, it’s relatively simple to quantify what Britney is losing by not removing advertisements for hardcore porn from a key channel of engagement for her fans: brand integrity. Her brand is being appropriated and remade without permission from her or her management by people with no respect for it.

Secondly, appreciating why it’s important to moderate user contributed content on the Facebook page either does take something more than common sense (like some expertise in media and/or communications) or the author doesn’t have sufficient common sense to be able to work out exactly why they think it’s a good idea.

Personally I like option A. It justifies the $12,000 and decade of my life I’ve spent gaining such knowledge.

Image credit: Ashley Scott, CC BY-SA

Tagged: Britney Spears, econsultancy.com, Facebook, social media

Posted in: Social media