This is the second version of this post. The topic turned out to be more complicated than intended. Ready? Go!
After all those positive messages about Nike on this blog I wanted to write a more critical one this time. Nike is one of the companies adjusting itself to the new media era very well with examples like Nike+ and recently the Chalkbot. When I ran into this article after reading something about it on Twitter I thought I needed to write a critical article on the way Nike apparently tried to control social media. But just on time I found out I needed to be critical towards myself first. The story the article tells and I wanted to re-tell for my own audience is the following:
Nike is known for sponsoring the finest athletes and basketball player LeBron James is one of the Nike’s biggest stars. During a training camp earlier this month James was ‘dunked-on’ by 20-year-old nobody Jordan Crawford. It is seen as an ultimate disgrace for a player and it’s something that does not fit an image of a super star. With this reason Nike demanded CBS immediately to erase the video tapes of the dunk. End of the story? Actually this created the story. Unsurprisingly the ‘hidden’ images found their way to YouTube . The dunk is hardly noticeble, but because of Nike’s attempt to censorship became a hit on internet (and now I am writing about it).
Social media are really difficult to control and the best reaction of companies would be to acknowledge this. Nike’s fail to control social media and the puclicity it generated, is known as the Streisand Effect:
“The Streisand effect is an internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized.” (Wikipedia)
When discussing the article with a friend he asked me how I could be so sure of the story. I got the article from the website BrandRepublic which is a website I trust, but after checking again it was part of the forum section. The article does not have any link to a source and after ‘googling’ the story once more I did not find any really trustworthy source at all. Moreover the video supposed to be the ‘evidence’ is not showing very clear images of LeBron James being ‘dunked-on’.
Where I wanted to criticize Nike for a wrong approach to social media, I could be doing exactly the same! Since I was not completely sure the whole story actually happened I did not have the right to write about it so easily. It could be even a false story attempting to harm Nike. How many times do we read something on the internet and take it for granted without thinking twice about the source?
If Nike did what the article says it did, it would have been pretty stupid. Social media have big advantages for companies, but can create bad publicity too. It’s all about the reaction of the brand. Nike could give a contract and an advertisement to the young basketball player who gave LeBron James a human face. Turning a bad moment into something good. But the final conclusion of this post is that nobody really can control new media and take them for granted. We should not even try! Stay critical!