Browsing: comments

News
Anonymous commenters rise up, use fear to rid the world of bad advertising
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A few of our esteemed contributors have placed ‘anonymous commenters’ in the villains section of our Year in Review questionnaire, as they did the year before. And it’s fair to say most would agree with those choices. But not all, it seems. We received an interesting ‘Anonymous Message’ from a generic email address with a link to a video featuring a shadowy figure in a Guy Fawkes mask outlining the surprisingly worthy, if rather threatening, intentions of anonymous commenters: to completely eliminate all bad ads from this world.

Opinion
The pros and cons of anonymity
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Given the attitude of ‘the normals’ towards marketing and advertising, it’s fair to say the industry has a few perception issues. Before I started this job, I envisaged being in the eye of the wankery storm in Auckland, surrounded by people who wore shiny shirts, drove ridiculous cars and used business jargon with absolutely no sense of irony. That’s occasionally true, of course, and my Invercargill-based parents are obviously deeply ashamed at what I’ve become, but, in my relatively short time spent writing about the industry, I’ve found it to be, by and large, full of exceptionally smart, talented, creative, hard-working, hard-playing, competitive and often very opinionated businesspeople. For some, the fact that it attracts extroverts is part of the industry’s appeal. For others, however, some these extroverts—and their often anonymous views posted on websites like this—give the industry an air of unprofessionalism. So, as we get set to relaunch StopPress, we thought it was a good time to delve into the thorny issue of online opinions.

News
Rude, abusive but legal – how to handle toxic comments
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Rude, abusive and offensive; it all makes good reading but publishers of social media — who can range from bloggers and niche media to mega-corporations and governments — must deal with the difficult question of what to do when comments go bad. On the one hand, you want to let comments flow freely (this is a democracy still, I think). On the other hand, some comments are anonymous, abusive, stupid and occasionally defamatory.

What’s a poor boy to do?