Titles are given out like candy these days…
Kurt Greenbaum, ”Social Media Director” for Stltoday.com, did the worst thing possible a “Social Media Director” could do. He abused the privacy of a social media participant and then tried to justify his abuse to the social media using community. To summarize ( original reddit.com threads here and here ) Ken Greenbaum tracked down a user who posted the word “pussy” as a comment on a blog post titled “whats the weirdest thing you’ve eaten”.
That is plain stupid of a “Social Media Director” to do for three reasons:
1. By opening up your doors to user submissions you inevitable open your doors to vulgarity, penis pictures, racism, hatred, idiocy, spam, and pretty much every “shocking” piece of media you can think of. Getting freaked out by “pussy” appearing as a comment to anything with the words “eaten” in it is not just overacting. Kurt Greenbaum is completely missing the fundamentals of internet social participation. Anything vaguely sexual will be made blatantly sexual. His overreaction is like jumping in the ocean and then whining that you got wet and salty. Thats what she said.
2. After this overreaction he tried to justify his actions to the internet world which generally does not give a shit how fancily or cleverly justified a response is. The internet passes judgement really quickly and regardless if thats good or bad it is responsible for tracking down stolen goods and removing pussycats from abusive homes.
If an angry internet user swarm is on the horizon you better duck and cover and hope that it doesn’t only rips off three limbs and not all four. Its really ignorant of him to assume a blog post reaction and some twitter comments will make this go away. This guy seriously underestimated the damage of a large angry internet swarm.
3. The whole “all media is good media” is a lie on the internet thanks to page rank and google bombing. 2 hours ago I had no idea who Kurt Greenbaum was. Now his name is permanently linked to blog reactions and twitter comments via the page rank algorithm. His name is pretty much synonymous with douchebaggery at this point and its all his fault for escalating a pretty banal situation.
What gets my goat is that this “Social Media Director” utterly missed the mark here. Social media is pretty new in earth time, but for internet time its pretty much ancient at this point. If your unable to grasp such basic concepts of the lewdness of anonymous individuals, the irrational nature of the internet swarm, and the permanency of bad exposure you really don’t deserve that title. Kurt Greenbaum is just another old man who thinks he “gets it” but certainly does not understand how this “internet” thing works. Just because you can post a twitter messages and write a blog post does not make you a social media expert.