Thursday, July 22, 2010

Case study: Distorted interpretation of social media

I was recently been alerted to a Facebook wall where something interesting just took place.

Interesting? I initially thought that it must be just another set of raunchy photos of some skimpily clad ladies or something similar to that. This is what Facebook is famous for after all... or am I wrong?

So the page loaded and yeah, I was definitely wrong. A quick glimpse on the header showed nothing interesting; it was just an announcement by OffGamers which served to advertise one of their many products...


... except the fact that there were way too many comments for such an ordinary announcement.

Reading through all the comments, I finally managed to figure out what the fuss was all about. Apparently, OffGamers' competitor - MOL - decided to make a not-so-smart-decision by invading and humiliating OffGamers for being a smaller company as compared to MOL.


It's pretty understandable if this Ganesh Kumar Bangah is a stupid new intern in MOL but no, this is the CEO himself WTF?!

As if the courtesy reply from OffGamers was not good enough, MOL's Sales Executive decided to join into the fray.


The more the merrier?

Pretty soon, it was almost like an onslaught, with so-called satisfied MOL customers filling the comments about their bad experience with OffGamers and how everything went oh-so-smooth with MOL.


Both accounts were newly created right after OffGamers's announcement.

Even my illiterate grandmother can easily identify these as dupes... err, if I translate them into Hokkien, of course!

In most circumstances, this kind of situation tend to turn ugly with name-callings and vulgarities thrown here and there but surprisingly, this was not the case here. In fact, there were a few funny comments that were exchanged which almost got me bursting out in laughter.


Gate-crashing = embracing social media HAHAHA~


Someone seriously need to enrol herself (or himself?) into a How-To-Create-Fake-Facebook-Account-101 class.


Let's see if Ija Mohan is as accurate as Paul?

At the time of writing, the amount of comments stand at 104 and I'm not sure if I'll be pursuing it any further after this. Nevertheless, even though I'm not in the position to judge on who is the culprit and who is the victim, kudos to OffGamers for displaying such a respectable level of professionalism in handling this particular awkward scenario.

MOL, you got to troll harder and better in the future.

-sigh-

P.S. You'll have to click on the photos to enlarge them for better reading. :)

4 comments:

me said...

what is this all about?

but the offgamers is having a nice skill of handling those spoilers...dont u think so?

(e+ho)ng said...

@me:
Yeah, I concur. Definitely a good skill to pick up. :)

Daniel Boey said...

It's on TNW -- http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/07/21/facebooks-newest-partner-is-an-internet-troll/

(e+ho)ng said...

@Daniel Boey:
Thanks for the URL. Another Malaysian standing in the eyes of the world... for the wrong reason. *facepalm*