Christian Grobmeier: Shell fails in social media

It is no secret that I am supporting Greenpeace while they fight against Shell to drill the arctic for oil. Since the disaster in the gulf of mexico we should have learned that drilling at deep places is dangerous; the arctic might not be so deep, but its 6 month dark and in case of an emergency like with “Deep Water Horizon” the oil would spill 6 months into the arctic see. The gulf is not clean yet, who would have an interest to clean up the arctic? Shell not, for sure! So this is my opinion that the arctic must remain untouched; instead we need sustainable energy and drive less car. In germany, where I pay > 1,60 € per litre of fuel I simply started to work more from home. It is fine with most of my customers. If that is not possible I use trains. Yes I still need my car, but I have reduced 40.000 km per year to 3.000. Therefore I feel well with simply saying: don’t drill the arctic.

Many people dislike what Shell does. Therefore Shell probably thought about having some cool ads which show the world how clean they are! They prepared a good bunch of photos and put it online. Nice photos, of bears, kids, birds… you know it. Visitors can take these images and put text into it. The ad will be visible on their website. Unmoderated. This happened:

Rule 1 for your website: don’t leave it unmoderated. And the weight of this rule doubles when there are tons of people out there who hate what you are doing.

Well ok, the harm is done. People wrote messages to @shellisprepared (Personal note: I hate that twitter name). One could think they simply login and delete the problematic images. And of course they quickly implement something like a moderation queue or something else which prevents people do put that kind of stuff to their website.

Shell recognized the problem and told people on Twitter they will remove the ads. The social media manager on Twitter acted immediately. He/she told people they will remove any unwelcome ad. For hours. I scrolled back on their twitter stream and looked 24 hours earlier. The Social Media Team wrote tons of messages like:

@christomofo Please, please, please stop sharing inflammatory ads. #shell #arcticready

— Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) Juli 18, 2012

Please, please stop. Yes ok, my expectation would be this helps. Really. It always has helped in the internet. Somewhere between they seem to be really desperate:

WE’RE FLATTERED BY THE ATTENTION BUT PLEASE STOP. We’d hate to get the #Shell legal team involved.

— Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) Juli 18, 2012

A total failure of understanding how twitter works can be found here:

PLEASE DO NOT RETWEET ANY OF OUR TWEETS. They are intended for their @ recipients only!

— Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) Juli 18, 2012

“Please do not retweet…” – I really thought this is some kind of media gag before I saw the whole disaster. It is like “PLEASE DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON”. Seriously, this is pretty funny after all.

Scrolling and scrolling I have finally came to the 16.07.:

@MartaBernstein Our team is working overtime to remove inappropriate ads. Please stop sharing them.

— Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) Juli 17, 2012

This is really going on for several days. Well this hard work is making the social media team pretty hungry:

Can anyone recommend a good, cheap kebab place in downtown The Hague?

— Social Media Team (@ShellisPrepared) Juli 19, 2012

Finally somebody made a pretty good suggestion to Shell:

Smartest move for @ShellIsPrepared, fire the entire social media team, including whoever is tweeting.

— Patricia E. Stein (@PsteinND) Juli 19, 2012

Well said Patricia.

Here is a little screenshot from their Twitterstream. I expect they will do something about it, maybe follow Patricias advise and delete all the Tweets I referred here. Never have I seen such a mistake in social media. Greenpeace 1 : Shell 0.

Disclaimer: I did not create such an Ad. I am happy with leaving that to other countless people.