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Ten days ago, Kurt Greenbaum was just the social media director for Stltoday, the website of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Today he's the target of a social media backlash that particularly stings -- instead of finding himself in the eye of a twit-storm on behalf of his employer, it's personal. Worse, the scandal casts doubt on his ability to function in a social media leadership role.

If you haven't heard about how Greenbaum reported an inappropriate comment to the poster's boss (getting him "resigned"), see below for some background links.

If you're up to speed, just ponder these screen shots showing what has happened to Greenbaum's personal brand in the ten short days.

While I consider Greenbaum's action outrageous, I'm not posting to indulge in Schadenfreude. Ever since "Reply to All" was invented, it's been ridiculously easy to screw up online. Instead, what lessons can we learn from this debacle?

Register Your Name As A Domain

Or, really, the inverse: don't leave a domain like kurtgreebaum.com out there for someone else to grab if you publicly screw up. For whatever reason, Greenbaum blogs at igreenbaum.com. But look what happens when you visit kurtgreenbaum.com: an invitation to visit kurtgreenbaumisapussy.com.

If someone's already using your name as a domain, it's still worth keeping an eye on it and calling "dibs" through your registrar in case it becomes available.

Don't use anything close to vulgarity while denouncing someone else's vulgarity

Commenters were quick to pick up on a Tweet from Greenbaum that went like this:

"...Amazed at the readers who comment in defense of a jackass who posted a vulgarity on our site..."

"Jackass" is certainly considered less profane than pussy in the context under discussion. But still, it was easy pickings for Greenbaum's critics.

Sometime over the weekend, Greenbaum locked down his Twitter stream.

Admit you screwed up. Don't be sanctimonious

When Greenbaum crowed about consequences imposed (with his help) on the "resigned" school employee, the smackdown came swiftly with commenters siding against Greenbaum about 37 to one.

In a dismayingly unapologetic follow-up post, Greenbaum's damage control is lacking.

• Greenbaum didn't mean to sound boastful. (Translation: he recognizes -- but cannot admit -- the he was bragging, but now understands he was wrong to do so.)
• Greenbaum acted on his own, with no input from editorial or legal higher-ups. His managing editor has his back, though, conceding that the action was hasty but claiming it was "consistent with what they've done in the past."
• Greenbaum might have overreacted.
• Greenbaum emphasizes the legal nicety of whose IP address the comment came from (in an attempt) to silence accusations that he violated the St. Louis Dispatch's privacy policy. Nary a glimmer of awareness the he violated readers' trust.

Background

KMOV-TV Coverage - includes disturbing comment from Managing Editor Rose that Greenbaum's behavior is consistent with things they've done in the past.

Post a Vulgar Comment from Work, Lose Your Job - Kurt Greenbaum's initial brag

Kurt Greenbaum's Follow-up Post - Greenbaum denies bragging and admits he went for the nuclear option without input from higher-ups, but is unapologetic.

Interview with Webmaster of Kurt Greenbaum Ridicule Site

So you're going on vacation! You've spent hours on flight search engines and build-a-vacation sites, carefully weighing price against convenience, agonizing over whether to take a round trip to the city with direct flights from your home base, or go for an open jaw trip (fly into one city, depart from another) that will save you the expense and hassle of traveling back to the arrival city -- but may involve stopovers and inconvenient scheduling.

Imagine going to all this trouble only to discover from your ticket agent at check-in that the "direct" flight you found and booked actually includes a stopover. Imagine the chagrin, considering that you've been consoling yourself all morning that, hey, you may be dragging yourself miserably out of bed at 5:00 AM, but at least it's a direct flight.

Take a look at this itinerary, representing the wonderful trip to Spain that John and I just finished yesterday. What would a normal person conclude about the flight schedule?

Doesn't this look like a 1-stop departure from Chicago to Granada (via Madrid), followed ten days later by a direct flight from Barcelona to Chicago? This is how it looked when I was selecting flights on my build-a-vacation site of choice, EuropeanDestinations.com, and to the best of my recollection I accepted an uncomfortably early departure in exchange for what I thought would be a direct flight.

With difficulty, you can see "Stops: 1" at the bottom of the screen shot. But the location of the stop is a secret. More importantly, the departure itinerary establishes the precedent of listing each leg individually. I wonder how many passengers will zoom in on the fine print and wonder where the plane will stop -- I know that none of the English-speaking passengers checking in with us had done so. All were shocked and disappointed to hear the ticket guy apologetically mention Madrid. For his part, this young man shrugged his shoulders apologetically and said "happens all the time."

John and I live in the Chicago area and tend to spend our big vacations in Europe, so direct flights really do make a difference. On the way to Europe, a long layover or missed connection due to weather problems, etc. can "steal" a day of your vacation. It makes it unwise to schedule activities and performances on the evening of your arrival, though that's sometimes unavoidable. A stopover on the way home is less risky, but far more exhausting. As we squeezed ourselves in airline steerage seats for the third time yesterday, John commented that he was glad the secret Madrid stopover came as a last-minute surprise, because he'd been enjoying the thought of a direct flight home for the entire trip. Along with a preference for Midway departures over O'Hare, direct flights are a factor for which we are willing to pay a little extra.

Insult Added to Injury

We quickly got over our disappointment and took the BCN-MAD leg without incident, and what turned out to be a three-hour layover allowed plenty of time for the bewilderingly unnecessary passport control between two Spanish cities -- I know Barcelona is in the autonomous region of Catalonia, but come on! It also allowed plenty of time for the several-kilometer journey to the new gate.

In fact, there were no problems at all, until (moments after being sternly ordered to get into our seats ASAP so we could get TF outta there) the pilot announced the first of many ten-minute delays due to a technical problem. At least we were only stuck on the tarmac for two hours. And in the terminal for another two hours. We ended up leaving Spanish airspace about 12 hours after our stressful, pre-dawn wake-up call, and our time in transit stretched to 21 hours, counting our foolish decision to travel home from O'Hare on public transportation rather than blowing $31 on a cab ride.

It would be unfair to blame this miserable trip home entirely on Iberia's hidden stopover, since the same thing could have happened to a BCN-ORD flight. As unfair as hiding a stopover in the fine print?

The announcement of Google Wave has occasioned something of a tirade on Google's "arrogance" from GigaOM's Jordan Golson.

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Today on a user forum for a certain web application I had the occasion to provide a little free SEO advice. This is nothing unusual, for the application attracts users at many levels of technical and design expertise.

The user had some basic SEO questions, including a request for advice about getting body text onto a homepage that was mostly images. What mystified me -- and prompted an immediate ALL CAPS response -- was whether "transparent text" would do the trick.

The user was an admitted newbie, so I took that into account and suggested some learning resources without presuming any nefarious intent. But in a sense, that puzzled me more? How would a user who knows nothing about seo find blackhat suggestions so easily? Wouldn't the most obvious, popular, mainstream seo information be considerably more findable at this point than trickery, especially to a newbie who doesn't know the terminology ("black hat," etc.) to search for? Or is this a testiment to the fact that once something's out there on the web, it's out there indefinitely?

Disclaimer: it's possible the newbie was interested in the visual effect of transparent text overlaid on his images, which would be moot in terms of search-engine-friendliness. But I made the assumption that, since he was trying to get readable body text onto the page, he was talking about hidden text using CSS tricks of the sort that had become useless long before I ever did SEO.

A Twit-storm the like of which I haven't noticed since #motrinmoms broke out yesterday. The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog has a fine single-page reference to the #amazonfail fiasco. In some circles the unfortunate event is being portrayed as "Amazon decides to block gay and lesbian books" but that's overstated. In fact, all that happened (which is bad enough) is that non-explicit books about gay and lesbian issues were somehow flagged as adult material, making them harder to find on the site. It's critical to note that other topics, such as rape, were affected as well as SOME straight sexuality-related titles. Amazon told Publishers Weekly it was a glitch, causing #glitchmyass to join #amazonfail as today's hot Twitter tag.

The problem with the immediate assumption of intentionality on Amazon's part is selection bias. The twit-storm focused almost exclusively on the glitch's impact on gay subject matter, because an author in that community brought the issue to light, and the community response, accordingly, focused on gay material. In fact, the glitch affected many topics that all have in common the frank discussion of sexuality, issues tangentially related to sexuality, or (more below) certain individual or subcultural biases that are inconsistent with Amazon's intended policies.

At this point, it's easy to believe the glitch story -- although I would describe it as a taxonomical glitch rather than a technical one. And an interesting discussion not taking place is the overlap of gay-related (and other affected) categories and keywords in family-friendly and adult contexts. The confusion this can cause may be ideologically neutral -- or not. I'm reminded of Olympic hopeful Tyson Homosexual, whose last name (guess what it is) was auto-replaced in news feeds by an "inappropriate language" filter on a conservative website. One can certainly infer an attitude toward gay people by a preference for the term homosexual (as if it were still a medical disorder), along the lines of what happens when you Google "Jew" as opposed to "Judaism."

Update April 14: Interestingly, a language-cultural barrier may have contributed to Amazon's glitch, which they've now attributed to a change to adult flagging made on the French Amazon site.

But something like that could just as easily happen by an effort to filter out any colloquialism. On my first web job, at a software company with worldwide reach, we tried to avoid American slang because so many of our users weren't American or even native English speakers.

What got people thinking about the possible role of tagging in the glitch was the discovery that gay and lesbian authors were also affected, regardless of book content. A list of wrongly-flagged authors and books grew quickly, courtesy of that part of the outraged blogosphere not attending family events yesterday. Along with the books containing G-rated, gay-related subject matter were books in which the only gay aspect seemed to be the sexual orientation of the author -- but Amazon users had tagged them with gay-related keywords anyway. It suggested that someone over at Amazon had adjusted the adult filter to cast a wide net specifically for gay-related keywords and many concluded that Amazon as a company (in their Seattle office, no less) had decided gay=dirty. I'd prefer to confine my ideological quarrels to users who tagged an Ellen Degeneres book with "exhibitionism" and a book about one gay adoption with "gay love," since an adoption memoir by a straight couple would simply be tagged with "adoption."

It's unlikely that tagging would be used for a purpose that had such real financial consequences as loss of sales rank and invisibility in best seller lists -- that's putting too much trust in crowdsourcing.

Did I mention crowdsourcing? Among measures like blog posts, petitions, open letters, etc., a retaliatory tagging campaign was launched. On Amazon, the tag #amazonfail appears on affected books (which, by now, are no longer flagged as adult). And in a variation on Google-bombing that I find guiltily amusing, check out the user-submitted tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. This work of science fiction, adding insult to injury, was one of the few "gay" books that avoided the adult tag. "Hmmmm," mused the Twittersphere and went to work vandalizing the book listing.

Tags for Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality as they appeared on the morning of April 13, 2009. Click picture to enlarge.

The moral of the story: Tags are an easy way to allow users to participate in your site organization. But they aren't "Set It & Forget It!" Now Amazon will need to decide what to do about a) #amazonfail as a tag and b) the tags and off-topic reader reviews now appearing on the Parent's Guide page. For all my ideological sympathy, I can't condone the gesture on user experience grounds, however half-hearted my disapproval must be.

Get Satisfaction provides a social media-y customer service platform for businesses wishing to outsource their customer care. GS also allows anyone to create an unofficial page about any company and set up an ad hoc user community.Jason Fried of 37 Signals took on Get Satisfaction in a March 31post, arguing that current GS treatment of these unofficial pages makes them look like official support channels rather than the glorified message boards they actually are.

Jason's concern touched on misappropriation of brand and reputation management. He first became aware of an unsanctioned, unmonitored "37 Signals page" at GS when an irate GS member wrote to him to complain about never getting a response to the issue s/he'd posted at GS. This, in itself, is a serious concern. And this concern should be solvablewithout the target company being coerced into joining GSto rescue these customers.

Adding insult to injury, GS was running AdWords units on these unofficial pages, allowing GS tosiphon off search engine users looking for 37 Signals support and thencollect ad revenue from 37 Signals competitors.(And who wouldn't click, after failing to get support from 37 Signals?)

A day later,Jason was back with a) appreciation of GS's quick response, as far as it went and b) some compelling screenshots to demonstrate exactly how Get Satisfaction's user experience confuses users as to whether a "Company X support community" hosted at GS is sanctioned and monitored by Company X.

I believe Jason's screenshots DO show an official-looking customer experience:

• Eight mentions of 37 Signals versus two subtle GS logos
• Calls to action to “Ask a question about 37signals and their products” (ask whom?) and "Report a poblem" (again, to whom?)
• Numerous examples of on-page search engine optimization connecting the 37 Signals brand to the concept of customer support

Does this prove intentionality? Can we state for the record that GS intentionally confused users -- specifically to pressure companies to sign up? I have to recognize plausible deniability here. It's entirely plausible that GS designed their pages for paying clients, and then made token tweaks to act as disclaimers for the unofficial pages. It's entirely plausible that this was done to get it out the door, period.

On the other hand, suspicion is entirely reasonable. What Jason's screen shots demonstrate is that suspicion can be reasonable, even if it'sunfounded. If GS were knowingly pushing the envelope to help out the sales force, this would be a great way to do it (except for the eventual outcry).As a 37 Signals commenter called dm offered, "When smart people appear to be doing dumb things look for alternative goals." With that user interface, no matterhow it came about,GS asked for suspicion.

To wrap things up, GS's latest blog post concedes pretty much all of Jason's UX objectionswhile giving no ground as to intentionality -- and professing gratitude to Jason for all the free UX consultation. Most substantial -- Get Satisfaction has committed to removeads from unofficial pages.This neutralizes most of the "blackmail" concern Jason raised in his initial post.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that every post on our classical music site HoldeKunst.com (that's German for "gracious art" or similar) was getting one comment, always to the same apparently Italian mp3 site. This blog, currently hosted on Squarespace, accepts comments without registration and posts comments immediately unless Squarespace's system gets suspicious andholds it for moderation.

At the same time I started noticing the following query in my keyword analytics:

 site:.com inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" 
-"you must be logged in" "music" 

The link takes you to the SERP on Google Indonesia. It's pretty clear from most the query that the searcher was looking for blogs about music, to make the comments appear relevant to our site. By subtracting "comments closed" and "you must be logged in," s/he filtered the search for blogs with comments open to unregistered users.

The following comment is typical: a vague mention of music to appear legit and slip by Squarespace, but without engaging the topic at hand (in this case, Bartok's first two piano concertos).

Old music is like a treasure of the olden times which is priceless.
mp3melhor (link removed)

This isn't that bad. It's not a special quality-of-life-enhancing medicine. The wording is perfectly polite. But every post was getting one such comment, with a link to this one website -- and with a different username every day. Clearly it's the same person trying to be sneaky. I'm willing to let some of this slide, but it can be annoying when a comment is just so obviously not real. Take a look at this one, on a post announcing my husband's upcoming music classes:

Well I can says that all sounds great my kids will be going for sure!
(linked to a musical instrument affiliate marketing website)

The classes, at the University of Chicago extension program,are for adults, and are generally given on weekday mornings when the "kids" will be in school. They cover the very kid-friendly topics of Grand Opera, Romantic Piano, and Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik). The kids can learn all about Holocaust-era musicians who suffered career setbacks, forced exile, and/or imprisonment in concentration camps. Somewent all the way to the gas chambers, including a group of children who performed in Theresienstadt.

But I digress.

I have various options for dealing with spam, and what I choose right now is to leave them unmoderated.I subscribe to the comments RSS, which allows me to see every comment without having to log in and moderate.We don't have numerous comments, but the few enthusiastic commenters is skewed toward an older demographic and some have reported confusion with various anti-spam measures. (That's another story, for the user experience files.)

I don't rush to remove these comments. I do do at my convenience because, ironically,Squarespace nofollowsthese links.

So my tip for today is that if you want to leave your comments open, be alert to queries like "-you must be logged in" in your keyword reports.

I wrote last week about the now-disappeared F-bomb in the Google Sitelinks for Original Pancake House. Chris Thomas at Reseo has another example from DFO (which stands for Direct Factory Outlet and something else.).

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