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Monday, March 16, 2009
Real Time Chatterbox: Separating the bad candies from the Skittles
There were three schools of thought on the transformation of the Skittles site to almost entirely social content. It was the greatest thing since Friendfeed, you thought it sucked on all levels, or you thought it would have been a great idea if it weren’t for all that Twitter nastiness so potentially damaging to the brand.
As soon as they realized the Skittles home page was displaying a Twitter search for “Skittles,” the adolescent and degenerate population started defacing it with a truly impressive amount of invective and filth. Some commentators speculated that this behavior forced the site managers to switch the home page the Skittles Wikipedia listing shortly thereafter.
This wasn’t the case. The plan was to alternate between all the social media sites to which the navigation is linked. Today, for example, Skittles’ YouTube channel is serving as the home page. The YouTube channel, along with a Flickr channel, are accessible by clicking on “Media.” Even at its worst, the Twitter search remained available by clicking on “Chatter.”
Still, a lot of marketers probably looked at the Skittles experiment and said, “Damn. Having a link to Twitter chatter about us would be a great idea, but not if it means our brand will be sullied by all that crap.”
What would be great would be the ability to filter out the four-letter words, the sexist and racist comments, even entire tweets by trolls.
Enter Shannon Whitley. It took Shannon—the creator of PRXBuilder (Shannon chairs the technology task force for the Social Media Release Working Group), Chat Catcher, and a bunch of other cool stuff—less than a couple weeks to create Real Time Chatterbox, a utility that lets you apply a variety of filters to a Twitter search so you can include the stream on your website without having to worry about inappropriate content.
The service is free for individuals and non-profits; you can create two Chatterboxes per account. Shannon is working on a subscription pricing model for commercial accounts, but you can try it out now. I have one running here, just as a test, for the keyword “PR” with a few choice obscenities and a few Twitter accounts filtered out. What you see here is real-time—refresh the page and any new tweets containing “PR” that isn’t filtered out will appear:
You can also go directly to the Chatterbox page.
The downside to such scrubbing of content is the risk of being viewed as a censor. I think it’s fine, though as long as you adhere to two guidelines:
- Disclose that you’re filtering out some content and explain what content is targeted and why.
- Limit the content you filter to objectionable language and deliberately provocative explicit and suggestive material. Filtering out tweets from people who just don’t have nice things to say about your product will damage your credibility.
I suspect it won’t be too long before several companies offer up Chatterboxes somewhere on their sites.
