Go Daddy approaches social media with the grace of someone swatting a fly in a china shop with a baseball bat.
Yesterday, tech sites were afire with the news that Go Daddy, one of the largest and most tasteless name registrars, strongly supported the pending SOPA legislation.
In response to each person on Twitter who mentioned Go Daddy and SOPA, they had a bot (or manually cut/pasted) reply of, “We encourage you to visit our blog to view our position on SOPA x.co/c0q4”
In response, a campaign started on Reddit encouraged website owners to migrate their domains to another registrar. Paul Graham announced that companies supporting SOPA would no longer be welcome at Demo Day. Ben Huh announced that he was moving all his domains elsewhere.
Suddenly this morning, Go Daddy changed their tune within a few hours. Only an hour after spending a message to @BrandingArc about their support of SOPA, they switched their bot to send, “Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA legislation. Click here to find out more - x.co/c2YS”
The first person they sent this message to was @yoda, then @andcarne and @aplusk.
Wait a second, a multi-million dollar company responded to @aplusk, one of the biggest people on Twitter with a formulaic response to his announcement that he would move his domains off Go Daddy? What were they expecting? That he might change his mind? That he might retweet them?
Go Daddy sent hundreds of messages like this. Didn’t matter if you had one follower or 9 million. Everyone got the same treatment- a weak message that was completely ineffective and missed the point.
People didn’t like Go Daddy. No one really does. People were largely just looking for a motivation to switch and this clueless support of this terrible legislation was just what people needed. Showing an even larger unawareness of the subtle parts of social media just hurts their case even more.
(Source: twitter.com)
