Web Content Mistakes and Worst Social Media Campaigns

We’re becoming more accustomed to correcting small-ish errors on wiki web pages when we come across them. I catch myself looking for an “Edit” link on other people’s pages, but of course not all web pages are editable. But that habitual reaction has me wondering about web content mistakes and how best to correct them.

What’s the biggest web content mistake you’ve seen (or done?)

Michael Silverman told us about the six-year-old news article that went out due to inaccurate automation techniques, causing a 75% drop in a company’s stock price before it could be corrected, in Save $1 Billion with Web Content Management! Now that is a big web content mistake.

So, what’s the best way to correct someone else’s web page? Does it matter if that web page is a blog entry? I typically would email someone whose blog entry I wanted to see a correction in. And when I correct blog entries, I always show the text deleted in strikeout format so that it always remains in the original post. I don’t want to seem like I’m hiding anything if readers who read it before the change remember the content differently. I think that approach only works well with blog entries, though.

The Suxorz

SXSW Interactive was last week in Austin, TX, and they will once again feature the “hall of shame” for social media at The Suxorz. They feature the web content campaigns they consider to be the most embarrassing or most poorly executed.

One of the common mistakes from last year’s panel was creating all-flash based sites but hiding the metadata from search engines. There are certainly ways to solve that problem, though. One example from a panelist at SXSWi last year was an example from Samsung. They used Flex and AJAX to create a web-based catalog containing 20,000 SKUs of different TV models. To avoid the problem of a lack of deep search, they used XML site maps to get all the deep links that werere previously not findable.

This year’s Suxorz are being discussed on this Facebook Group. Hasbro shutting down Scrabulous seems to have a couple of votes, and really any campaign with the scent of dishonesty will get a vote or two. For example, Belkin paying for reviews on Amazon and New Egg stuck out to me.

What would you vote for as an example of poor execution on web content?