social media round up
Social Media Round Up – Facebook Announces Communities Summit And United Has Another Pr Disaster
This week, three explosions occurred next to the football team bus of Borussia Dortmund as the team were travelling to their quarter-final Champions League match against Monaco in Germany. The explosions left one player injured and meant that the game had to be postponed until the following day. Although rivalry between football teams has a long history, Dortmund supporters showed a touching humanitarian approach to the situation by offering the ‘away’ Monaco fans accommodation in their homes for the extra night. Football fanatics from the home country took to Twitter to offer their hospitality to supporters of the opposing team using the hashtag #bedforawayfans. The kind gesture saw many photos posted on Twitter of groups of fans from both of the opposing teams gathered around a dinner table, smiling and laughing while one added a touching caption “when terrorism tries to divide, football unites. Dortmund fans are giving Monaco fans a place to stay at using #bedforawayfans!” Mark Zuckerberg has announced the first Facebook Communities Summit – a conference for group admins on Facebook. It’ll take place in Chicago on 22-23 June and promises to celebrate the people who build communities on the social media platform. People from across the U.S. can apply to attend – it’s free – and if accepted you just need to fund your travel to Chicago. The application involves telling the story behind the Facebook group you are in charge of and how you’ve been inspired by the group. This is a step taken by Zuckerberg after he announced in his manifesto earlier this year that he was going to take understanding his country, and the factions within it, seriously. It looks set to be a fascinating summit and we’ll be keeping an eye out for the full agenda when released. In other Facebook news, the social giant has this week introduced an update to its payment feature. In 2015, Facebook introduced person to person payments allowing users to connect their debit cards and directly send money to their friends within its messaging service, Facebook Messenger. The platform is now allowing its users to send group payments with the option to pay either everyone in the group or individual members through clicking the payments icon. The new feature is handy for situations where everyone is chipping in on a group gift or splitting a restaurant bill. At the moment the new feature is only available in the US but we’ll patiently watch this space to see if it arrives in the UK… It’s been a rough couple of weeks for United Airlines, after leggings gate a few weeks back the latest scandal for the airline comes after a flight was overbooked which resulted in a 69 year old man being dragged off an aeroplane. A video of the event went viral this week, the story was also covered by all the national press in the US and UK and people took to social media to condemn the way that United Airlines handled the situation. People on Twitter used the hashtag #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos to ridicule the airline whose motto is ‘fly the friendly skies’. To add further fuel to the fire, an apology issued by the company’s CEO did not refer to the violence experienced by the 69 year old man and was largely regarded as a non-apology. A real PR lesson to be learned here is when situations like this happen a timely response that addresses the errors and shows remorse is crucial. Time will tell whether or not sales are affected by yet another PR disaster.#BEDFORAWAYFANS_
FACEBOOK COMMUNITIES SUMMIT_
PAY WITH FACEBOOK_
UN-FRIENDLY MOTTOS_
