Less than a week after the White House thought that YouTube was a safe place to display anti-drug videos, came news that the Air Force had cancelled its profile on MySpace because of concerns about associating the service with content that it deems inappropriate. According to The Air Force Times:
The Air Force Recruiting Service launched the profile Aug. 21 to promote its new “Do Something Amazing” television and online advertising campaign, but decided to pull the plug on the profile after the new campaign launched Monday, said Col. Brian Madtes, chief of the Recruiting Service’s strategic communication division.
“It gave us a great opportunity for people to vote for the commercial,” Madtes said. “The danger with MySpace is we got to the point where we weren’t real comfortable with the potential for inappropriate content to be posted [on the page of] a friend of a friend. We didn’t want to be associated with that … and tarnish our reputation.”
Interestingly, the Marine Corps’ MySpace page is still active and had 21,016 “friends” as of Sept. 19. Kudos to Shannon Seery for finding the story.
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Hi David – Glad that you found the seed on newsvine. I find the Air Force/MySpace story interesting as I don’t necessarily agree that just because there is some questionable material on MySpace that they should ban this from their recruiting strategy. The Air Force is targeting 18 to 24 year olds – and for this demographic, utilizing social networking site makes perfect sense.
I agree Shannon especially as the MySpace profile was up for only about a month. I think this illustrates the dilemma that many marketing managers are facing with social networks. They really like the demographics, but they are not ready to give up control of the messaging and engage in a two-way conversation.
David
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