Examples of Web Branding Gone Awry?

March 19, 2007 1:57 PM

Can you think of any examples of established companies seeking user-generated content and the results backfiring?

I'm working on a presentation of best practices for PR firms who help companies sponsor and incorporate user-generated content into their branding. I'm looking for case studies where efforts backfired and how the company responded.

Things I might be interested in:
- Where a company starts a blog and commenters start to pick apart claims and embarrass the company;
- An ironic and satirical video rises to the top of a brand video contest;
- Enterprising individuals customized merchandise so that it makes a political statement.

I'm sure there's a lot more out there.

Can you provide me with some specific examples?

One's I'm considering right now:
- The media coverage of MoveOn.org's 2004 video ad contest where a submission that compared Bush to Hitler stole all the thunder out of the contest.
- When Nike started offering customized wording on shoes and they quickly banned individuals from using the word "sweatshop".

posted by jmprice to computers & internet (21 answers total)

Last year, Chevy had a website that let users create ads for the 2007 Chevy Tahoe by arranging pre-selected bits of audio and video. However, users could also insert their own text, leading to a series of critical videos that were distributed all over the web via YouTube and the like.

Link to NYTimes story.
posted by thewittyname at 2:05 PM on March 19, 2007

The Chevy Tahoe, although, depending on your point of view, it might not have backfired after all.
posted by phoenixy at 2:05 PM on March 19, 2007

The Bush/Cheney Slogantor
posted by MaxVonCretin at 2:13 PM on March 19, 2007

LA Times Wiki.
posted by Good Brain at 2:15 PM on March 19, 2007

Real's petition for Apple to open up their proprietary formats.
posted by PercussivePaul at 2:24 PM on March 19, 2007

LA Times wiki link
posted by jessamyn at 2:25 PM on March 19, 2007

Email in profile.
posted by hermitosis at 2:27 PM on March 19, 2007

When Virgin asked b3ta to do some viral marketing work. I wonder why (nsfw?).
posted by Harry at 2:34 PM on March 19, 2007

Some wildly unpopular right-wing politician started a blog recently and was swamped with insults in the comments. He took it down and brought it back up with screened comments, but someone still slipped in a comment about truthiness. I'll see if I can find it.
posted by lostburner at 2:46 PM on March 19, 2007

Lostburner, you're probably thinking of Tom Delay's blog.

See the original, deleted comments here.
posted by thewittyname at 2:54 PM on March 19, 2007

The Chevy Tahoe, although, depending on your point of view, it might not have backfired after all.

Tahoe YTD sales are down 29.8% compared to last year, so I don't think "any publicity is good publicity" applied here.

Hummer experienced similar drops (24.9% YTD), but a few other SUVs are actually up (Yukon is up 19.1%)

As such, it appears that the Tahoe's performance, after the ad-campaign in question, has matched the worst in the market.
posted by PEAK OIL at 2:56 PM on March 19, 2007

Modern Library's web poll for "Best 20th century novel" resulted in four Ayn Rand novels and three L. Ron Hubbard novels (plus sundries).
posted by j.edwards at 2:58 PM on March 19, 2007

witty, that's the one. Here's a Metafilter thread about about it.
posted by lostburner at 2:58 PM on March 19, 2007

Surveys and online polls would be a good topic to mine. A couple of examples off the top of my head: a 1998 People Magazine poll of the Most Beautiful People was won by Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf... in 2006, Stephen Colbert won the online poll to name a bridge in Hungary.
posted by MegoSteve at 3:10 PM on March 19, 2007

another point you might want to consider in your presentation is that sometimes user-generated projects are designed to fail, thus proving that users should leave content creation to the professionals. This was my take away from the LA Times wiki "experiment".
posted by kamelhoecker at 4:34 PM on March 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

Another poll gone awry: the American Family Association created an online poll about gay marriage, the results of which they intended to take to Capitol Hill to show lawmakers that the American public severely disapproved. When word got out, the poll's results immediately seesawed the other way, and the AFA pulled the poll down when the votes were 2-1 in favor of gay marriage.

Full story here.
posted by tomatofruit at 4:54 PM on March 19, 2007

That Tahoe thing was so so so SO awesome. I wish it were still up.
posted by DU at 5:15 PM on March 19, 2007

on the reverse angle, there's also NTHellWorld.com, a website that was set up for disgruntled customers to bitch about NTL, a UK cable company with a piss-poor reputation for customer service.

NTL got so much bad publicity from it, they actually bought the website off the founder, and turned it into a customer service forum in an attempt to save face. Couple of years later they shut it down due to the users' inability to say anything even remotely positive about the company, IIRC!
posted by derbs at 6:08 PM on March 19, 2007

More recently, how about the Dell IdeaStorm website? Thats done a good job of pointing out every single Dell failure.
posted by Nik_Doof at 7:09 PM on March 19, 2007

When Netscape relaunched their portal as a Digg clone, users quickly voted stories like "Netscape is copying digg" and "Give us back our old Netscape" to the top.

Coverage here and here.
posted by lodev at 7:10 AM on March 20, 2007

another point you might want to consider in your presentation is that sometimes user-generated projects are designed to fail, thus proving that users should leave content creation to the professionals.

kamelhoecker nails it -- PR companies typically aren't worried about "OMG what if this succeeds?!" They're looking for reasons not to do anything community-based, and they're keenly aware of the litany of failures that happen.

The truth is, most of the time people don't set expectations and community guidelines a priori, and then are surprised when people act like, well, people.

But as far as "Enterprising individuals customized merchandise so that it makes a political statement." -- I suspect Jonah Peretti's Nike "Sweatshop" sneakers are the definitive example here.
posted by anildash at 1:52 PM on March 20, 2007