It’s like a lesson in how not to use social media. Village Voice Media, looking for more hits for their various web properties, hires some “social media experts” to drive more traffic to their sites. Said experts start spamming Reddit, and then get caught doing so.
Unsurprisingly, VVM decided to apologize… Well, kind of:
Like any journalistic endeavor, we want as many eyeballs as possible on the stories our award-winning scribes publish. To that end, we hire folks (“social media experts,” we hate that term too) to get eyeballs on our stories so we can focus on telling the stories that matter to our readers.
Then we noticed this was happening.
To say we almost went off the rails is putting it lightly. Like Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, we rushed to correct those problems in an effort to stay engaged with the reddit community in an honest way.
Not enough of an apology for you? Well, maybe the edit of “We apologize” being added three times to the original statement would help. Or, perhaps, the comments following the post from Nick, “senior web editor at Village Voice Media” will offer some sincerity:
We [****]ed up. I, on behalf of Village Voice Media, am trying to make this right with the reddit community.
Nick added that, not only have the offending experts been terminated, but that VVM is considering an ad buy on Reddit to make up for the offense. Clearly, more websites should declare they’re upset at Village Voice Media–for the sake of their ad revenue if nothing else.
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