How can you make the anniversary of a tragedy worse? Social media, of course!September 11th is a tough day for lots of Americans. I was living in New York on 9/11 and watched the towers fall from the balcony of my apartment, charred sheets of paper blowing in my front door. It was awful. The best response to the anniversary of that awful day is a little silence, but unfortunately not everybody thinks that way and yesterday was chock full of 9/11 fails.
An unidentified Marriott hotel paid a little tribute to the victims with a very generous half hour of free coffee and mini muffins.
Somebody at Esquire wasn’t paying attention and used Richard Drew’s famous picture of a man plummeting from the World Trade Center to illustrate an article about “making your morning commute more stylish.” They later blamed it on a technical glitch.
AT&T might have had good intentions in Tweeting this image of the two columns of light at the World Trade Center site, but it didn’t go over well. The general response was that the telecommunications company was capitalizing on the tragedy.
You don’t have to be a huge brand to make a media fail on 9/11. Wisconsin golf course Tumbledown Trails took out a newspaper ad offering a bargain – 9 holes of golf for just $9.11. Needless to say, they spent the day fielding death threats from upset neighbors.
Did you see any social media fails we missed on 9/11?