How much of my day do you think I spend thinking about corporate tweets?
Virtually none.
I know what the people who run those social media platforms are like; I know what their job is.
Their job is to get retweets and they don’t care how they do it. These people know that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Paddy Power are one organisation who specialise in this.
Now, it doesn’t always work.
When they tweeted something about Billy McNeill a couple of years ago when he was visibly struggling during the Champions League draw most of us were absolutely appalled and I was not the only Celtic fan who closed my account with them as a result of it.
Their half-assed apology didn’t come close to controlling the backlash from that particular, although I understood that it was a genuine mistake by a social media team who didn’t have a clue what the big man was going through. There are lines you just have to draw.
Today social media is awash with nonsense about Subway as the press and Sevco’s fan sites salivate with a story about a tweet the sandwich company made to a Celtic supporting customer who was not very impressed by their latest product.
The guy himself wasn’t bothered by the response; in fact he said he was on his way to one of their branches for something to eat.
Still, the predictable happened. The hacks picked it up and La La Land loves it.
What is it with them and simple pleasures for their simple minds?
Is this how far down into the doldrums they’ve fallen that they need “lifted” by stuff as poor as this?
Do they think the person who sent that tweet sleeps under a Union Jack duvet and has a Morelos tattoo on his arse?
That person did his or her job, brilliantly.
They promoted the brand, and got it trending. Well done.
Tomorrow they’ll tweet something negative about the Ibrox club and that’ll generate another day’s numbers, but in that case probably a ton of hatemail and bile as well.
It’s not the only story like this in the media today and which has the Peepul over the moon.
The Record just put up one of its pathetic pieces, about the “all time league table” and of course a club called Rangers is top.
As I said in a piece last week, they must be the only people who don’t know that in boxing it doesn’t matter what’s on the scorecard if one of the fighters gets knocked out; Celtic survived the so-called rivalry. Rangers did not.
Over at The Scotsman Joel Sked has published his umpteenth article on how “data experts” FiveThirtyEight have “calculated” that Sevco will win the league with 97 points.
SevcoLand is loving that too.
I have knocked this down so thoroughly in the past that I am not even going to go into it today, but I notice that Sked only ever publishes this article – this is about his fourth one on the same subject; is it possible to plagiarise your own work? – when that site is predicting a Sevco title win.
It is the most pathetic form of lazy journalism this, meaning nothing at all, but regurgitated over and over again because the Ibrox hordes find it comforting.
There is no analysis is his piece.
None whatsoever.
Sked doesn’t add any of his own thoughts … which if you’ve read his articles you’ll know is almost certainly a good thing.
It’s clickbait, like their “rolling blog” during the day which changes the headline every couple of hours so that it dominates the news aggregators … and what’s on it when you check?
A rehash of old rumours, stories days old and even a handful of blogs.
This kind of stuff must have readers. I suspect that most of those readers are of the Sevco persuasion because so much of it panders to them.
They are the stupidest fans in world football, but honestly, I think it’s just wrong that so much of the media dumbs down to their level.
The rest of us have to wade through acres of this sub-par nonsense as a result.