A weekly roundup of media news and talking points, sans effort

 

Thought for the Week 

“We are running a small test which shows the text ‘[Satire]’ in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed… …This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.” An unidentified Facebook spokesperson, as quoted on BBC News, discussing why the network is experimenting with a tag to identify satirical articles, proving that the network does in fact believe most users are too stupid to understand when things need to be taken seriously.
 

Weekly High

In what will be forever known as Donut Tuesday, Greggs managed to turn a PR nightmare into a great example of how to handle a crisis on the fly. After the bakery’s logo was changed by unknown tech assailants, meaning when you typed the company name into Google an offensive version of the real branding was displayed alongside information about the firm, the social media team did exactly what you should do when it all goes wrong- responding to every incoming  tweet honestly, in good humour, and making every effort to rectify the image as quickly as possible.
Here’s what people found on Google:

 
Here are some of our favourite responses from Greggs to try and put out the emerging fires… 

 

 


 

Weekly Low

As civil unrest continues to stalk the U.S. town of Ferguson in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, with cops pointing guns at protesters and journalists, and accusations of institutionalised racism rife, the town’s decision to hire a PR agency hasn’t gone down very well at all. Then people found out the firm drafted in to deal with media requests apparently has an all-white team in the office, according to its website’s staff photographs, resulting in many more negative news stories.

 

Stories to keep an eye on

Twitter has announced a significant change to the way your Timeline will behave, meaning tweets from accounts you don’t follow, but which are deemed relevant, will now show up. 
Video sharing site Vine will now allow clips to be imported from other platforms for the first time, a move the network hopes will increase user numbers by making it possible for people to create content for multiple platforms.
Channel 4 boss David Abraham has warned that as more US media giants buy up UK broadcasters creativity is likely to suffer in television, with both Virgin Media and Sky amongst the companies owned by American firms- the comment has sparked a backlash from organisations Stateside. 

 

Just in case you missed it…

According to statistics from the Internet Advertising Bureau, 6% of the UK’s leading technology and telecoms companies have no mobile presence. Take a look at why we think mobile advertising, marketing and support in Britain is still lagging behind where it should be.