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“How far would you go?”

LiveLovely.com, an apartment-hunting site, pissed off SF this week by stealing tweets (with users’ names & images) and then posting them (probably) illegally around the City. The idea was to create a buzz on Twitter about their brand.

There is one massive problem with this advertising campaign in my view: no one wants to be friends with a jerk.

Andy Wright (@andyjeanius) at the Bay Citizen did a great job breaking this “guerrilla” gaffe. From her article we learn that the campaign was the brain child of the LiveLovely marketing intern* with “the goal of getting a conversation started on Twitter”. The problem is that the boss, Joel Goyette, Community & Marketing Manager at LiveLovely (who “has been creating and nurturing communities long before “Community Manager” became a job title”, seriously it says that on his bio.) didn’t think about the communities he was trying to monetize before he pulled the trigger on this asinine campaign.

Lesson one on creating and nurturing community: be a good neighbor. Don’t step up all NKOTB and piss off the communities you’re trying to get in with. Seriously. It’s not awesome.

Twitter has a policy about using other people’s tweets, it goes like this: Get users’ permission before…when you don’t, they write creeped out blogs like this one. And last I checked, people hate it when you litter in their neighborhood.

Anyhow, it’s nothing new. Companies do this all of the time. Go check your gate – if you live in my neighborhood you’ve got at least one pizza/Chinese/house-painting flyer tied to your house, or under your windshield wiper. It’s annoying and it’s litter. In fact it’s such a pain that President of the Board, David Chiu sponsored a new handbill ordinance to combat this type of problem.

Let’s be good neighbors to each other, and let’s think twice about what community really means.
*We think interns are awesome and have creative, cool ideas – but not every idea is a winner.