Over the years, this station has gotten away with more outrageous comments on the radio than anyone would have expected in such a PC city and this afternoon, someone at The End tried to take this attitude online.
Below is a picture of what was published publicly on The End's Twitter account this afternoon:
Before I move on I want to clarify that I am not writing this post out of anger. I believe that the online space should be a space for reflection and rationality, not blame and hate.
I think that whoever published this post failed to understand the nature of the online space.
Radio, for a long time, has been a one-way medium. The station controls what you listen to. From music to talk shows, you hear the main content but miss out on the content that is being generated in parallel to the programing. This means that the listener doesn't know what any other listener thinks of the content being played(besides screened commentators). I believe this creates a lack of accountability. Radio is not held responsible for any of its content by its users.
The Internet, however, is a multidimensional space. Something is said and it can be copied, pasted, forwarded, posted, Tweeted, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, etc. Responses can be made to any of these forms and the original commenter has no control over the information as it spreads through out the system. We call this Viral Marketing if it is positive but have started denoting the negative iteration of this with a #fail sign.
Whoever posted the comment above must not have understood this difference between the two mediums and thus could not have foreseen the potential repercussion (psst I am giving this person a bit more credit than I actually think he/she deserves):
Personal opinions are one thing online but as a Brand you have to be aware that in this space you represent more than just a set of attributes you and your team came up with around a table one afternoon. You represent the team that you work for and the customers that buy your products or services.
Tomorrow morning, The End might decide that they did nothing wrong. That they stuck to their brand. That said, I doubt that "alienate" is something that any senior management from a radio station wants associated with their brand.
UPDATE: This morning, The End posted as statement that claimed that their Twitter account had been hacked.
This seems very fishy since someone was responding to the backlash from The End alias (unfortunately, I failed to get a screen shot of this) for about two hours after the original post went up. If the account had been hacked, the hacker would have posted the comment and watched the storm hit. He/she wouldn't sit there and defend whatever was said. As @jonathanlawson put it this morning, The End's "twitter hacking" explanation is disingenuous. They erased original tweets to dodge accountability. At least now we know the person that posted the original comment isn't the only one over there that doesn't really understand how the online space works.UPDATE #2: Tech Flash and The Stranger comment on the event and Paul Constant makes a better argument for why it was not a hacker (he also has a screen shot of The End posts!).
UPDATE #3: And The End's response to criticism that it wasn't a hacker.
