Alabama's Local 15 News Live Twitter Billboard

A few days ago I found this shocking blog claiming “Live Twitter News Billboard Leads to Social Media Fail“… go ahead, read it and see if you agree.

First, the fact that they pulled off a digital billboard with live tweets is awesome.

So now ask yourself, what was the cause of this event? live tweets? twitter? social media?

The answer is none of the above. The only reason this happened is due to organizational readiness. There are two factors here:

1. Are they ready to accept that people talk? Does it really matter if something like this shows up? how much is it really going to affect their brand? is it really a failure? what are the thresholds and limits?

2. If it is a concern, why didn’t they implement a simple keyword filtering? Any simple profanity filter would have caught the word ‘rape’.

3. If simple keyword filtering is not enough, they could easily have hired a moderation company. Moderation could have been pretty simple to do … would require a person/company to approve every tweet to go live on the billboard. Depending on the refresh rate and how real-time this billboard gets the data, this task could be really simple. Just refresh it every 10 minutes, select 140 tweets per day, done.

So did Twitter lead to failure? I don’t think so … they agency should have added a few precautions, but even without anything in place, the fact that I’m blogging about this and giving props to their agency for innovating digital out of home advertising is great for a local news station … I think it was well worth it.