Facebook Spam Attack: On Managing Crises
Earlier this month, you may have noticed a flood of inappropriate material on Facebook. While those directly affected by the spam attack already know of its magnitude and were alerted by Facebook, many Facebook users were left thinking, “What has gotten into my friends today,” and if you’re like me, you may have even blocked those “friends” and considered deleting your account. Since the McCauley Marketing team spends quite a bit of time on Facebook researching and implementing social media marketing efforts and because some of our team members were directly affected by the spam attack, we were very interested to hear Facebook’s reaction to this mess.
A family-friendly website for the most part (allowing children as young as 13 to hold an account), Facebook users were enraged to see pornography, violent images, and graphic content scroll across their newsfeeds. Facebook’s team was forced to perform customer relationship management tactics to keep users from deleting accounts and never looking back, but first they had to identify the cause of the attack. Although there were various groups who’d previously threatened to hack the site and/or shut it down, Facebook’s security team was able to determine that the spam was caused by a hack that exploited web browsers and caused users to unknowingly paste malicious code into their browser’s URL bars and share it with their network.
Facebook’s public relations team immediately took measures to counteract the attack. Within two days, they found the issue and removed most of the graphic material. They also alerted affected users (users who actually shared malicious material) and provided them with information on better protecting themselves and their pages in the future.
Although none of the articles we read mentioned it, the McCauley Marketing team can’t help but wonder if any business fan pages were affected during this massive spam attack. Just like Facebook, the businesses that have Facebook fan pages cannot risk compromising their professional reputation. Those who use Facebook or other social networks as a part of an online marketing strategy have to be extremely cautious to avoid crises like this and react appropriately if an issue arises.
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