Patriots Twitter promotion goes wrong...

I don't have twitter and the Boston.com article is poorly written. I don't understand what happened. Did the Pats e-mail or twitter out that message or someone hacked them or what? I don't get what happened.

Lavictoire said:

I don't have twitter and the Boston.com article is poorly written. I don't understand what happened. Did the Pats e-mail or twitter out that message or someone hacked them or what? I don't get what happened.

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The Patriots' twitter account was "celebrating" surpassing 1 million followers

They had a system set up where every new follower after 1 million, automatic tweets were sent out thanking each person for being a fan. Alongside each tweet, included a computer generated picture with that person's username on a Patriots' jersey. Someone took advantage of this and made an account with that racist username because they knew it would likely get a tweet.

patchick said:

This one is going straight into the syllabus of every internet marketing course across the country, IMO.

My first thought, like many of you, was "obviously they should have a human proofread and approve the tweets." But they sent out thousands of them at a time, most of which were the unreadable word salad typical of Twitter handles. I suspect a human would have been just as likely to fail as a text filter, if asked to scan thousands of lines of this...

thodgpitcher31 PureNobodyMUT FuSheekie nosrednAyrahcaZ spencepascuzzi RichHomieZaQuan HolidayJesus Mo_Monay7 GuyNamedTawanda acbjdigitalops NneomaIbe dunhamandeggs blvdjakar1_ ItsBaileyDuhhh

...with the vague target of "anything that could make the company look bad."

That's just a small sampling of the actually Twitter addresses they @ replied to. Here's a tricky one:

That's just a guy's handle from the list. He means it positively, and he's a football fan. OK or not?

The whole promotion, then, might just have been too risky. Which is a shame, because it's pretty darned cool.

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Whenever a company does an initiative online, especially if it's automated, someone within the Communications and/or IT department should always ask, "what can go wrong?"

It's just common sense and there's been so many examples of twitter promotion gone wrong.

Lavictoire said:

I don't have twitter and the Boston.com article is poorly written. I don't understand what happened. Did the Pats e-mail or twitter out that message or someone hacked them or what? I don't get what happened.

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The Patriots had their 1,000,000th follower sign up.
The sent out a tweet thanking and congratulation them, including a message from Gronk.
I would appear they set it up in advance to autofill the Twitter name of the 1,000,000th follower.
Unfortunately that followers Twitter name was @IHATENIGGERSS

How the heck did that guy hit the lottery and know he would be the 1 millionth? I get it. He just put it out there and it hit. Sounds like a college kid prank.

AndyJohnson said:

The Patriots had their 1,000,000th follower sign up.
The sent out a tweet thanking and congratulation them, including a message from Gronk.
I would appear they set it up in advance to autofill the Twitter name of the 1,000,000th follower.
Unfortunately that followers Twitter name was @IHATENIGGERSS

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That may be the story that filtered through a game of media telephone, but what actually happened was much more minor.

To celebrate having 1 million followers, they set up a cute little promotion where everyone who retweeted a particular message would get an automatic reply including an image of a Patriots jersey with their user name on the back. They sent out THOUSANDS of these (none of which appeared in their main Twitter stream to followers). Among the thousands was one user with the offending name.

I'm curious how i was even spotted...perhaps the offensive individual crowed about it?

patchick said:

I'm curious how i was even spotted...perhaps the offensive individual crowed about it?

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I was wondering the same thing. For it to go viral the way it did, makes you wonder exactly how it unfolded.

Rex saying f*** to the head ref on live TV to take frustration off winning 1 win in 9 games should have been ridiculed by the media.

This is nonsense. First of all, the story here is the Patriots auto-generated t-shirts if you tweeted them to thank them for getting them to 1,000,000 million. It was a random account and anyone who tweeted them could get this custom-image-jersey-thanks-reply from the Patriots, NOT the millionth post automatically sent to follower #1,000,000.

Secondly, Boston.com was one of the first places to write about it. They wrote the headline and most of the article to make it seem like it was the millionth' post which got more bad press.

Third, when you realize the image is fake, and the Patriots filter didn't fail at all, this is a non-story.

The second I looked at the screenshot, I knew it was fake. The Jersey name in "NIG" is spelled "N1G". But the tweet reply to, supposedly from the Patriots, sends the message to @"NIG".

Fourth, if in 2014 Twitter allows anyone to create a racial slur as a twitter handle by replacing the letter i's with 1's is ridiculous. That is a failure of Twitter, not the Patriots. That was a very basic check in any video game or forum and Twitter failed.

Of course, creative trolls could have made a more advanced permutation of the name. But then it would not be a news story, right?

Why is the screenshot fake? Again, the @ sign is for the i' version and the text on the jersey has 1's.

Before taking the screenshot, the HTML of the Twitter reply was edited to make it read like the Patriots were replying to @"NIG" instead of "N1G" (again, it says N1G on the shirt). That's so that when it's sent to the media, it looks much stupider on the Patriots part.

In conclusion, Twitter screwed up badly here. And the Boston media for sending a fake screenshot around and blaming the Patriots. But I want to note that Twitter wasn't as bad as allowing the full NIG* version. That text was edited via HTML before the "screenshot" was taken. However, Twitter still takes all the blame because a company "worth" billions of dollars on the stock exchange should not have allowed banned words to appear, even if you replace i's with 1's or lowercase l's or whatever else makes it look similar.

I wish I pointed this out early on to save everyone the trouble. Haven't checked the media to see if there's a s***storm today.

Can mods update the original thread title as "FAKE: " or whatever and post this additional information or link to this post?

AndyJohnson said:

The Patriots had their 1,000,000th follower sign up.
The sent out a tweet thanking and congratulation them, including a message from Gronk.
I would appear they set it up in advance to autofill the Twitter name of the 1,000,000th follower.
Unfortunately that followers Twitter name was @IHATENIGGERSS

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Well it looks like the Aryan Brotherhood is on Twitter. What a pathetically disgusting thing to do...

Stu Pidassle said:

Clearly this is not acceptable. As a society we have progressed past this sort of thinking. The issue is with one neanderthal, not an institution like the Patriots. We need to stop empowering the fringe element by paying any attention to their shtick.

That said, it is funny that someone pranked the Pat's. It would have been better if they used something more wholesome like @hehatemyanus

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I don't think anyone is really blaming the Pats, other than possibly pointing out that might have been paying a little more attention.
But I'm pretty sure we, as a society, have NOT progressed past this sort of thing, not at all.

rochrist said:

I don't think anyone is really blaming the Pats, other than possibly pointing out that might have been paying a little more attention.
But I'm pretty sure we, as a society, have NOT progressed past this sort of thing, not at all.

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Whether we have, as a society, progressed past this sort of thing is a topic for debate. What is not debatable is that in a country of 300 million, the behavior of one individual does not constitute an indictment of the remainder of the populace.