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  1. Business
12 October 2012

What Samsung and Special-K taught us about social capital this week

The week's social media lessons.

By Fred Crawley

This week’s do’s and don’ts:

Tech giants, do follow Samsung’s lead and reward cheeky requests from loyal customers with priceless one-of-a-kind freebies. It makes you look like merry pagan gods bestowing favour on mortal whims. Do also, however, work out a strategy for what to do once you’ve suggested that people can basically use crap pictures of animals as currency. Or fight to change the world economy to actually work along those lines. It would make business blogging much more entertaining, at least.

Speaking of meaningless currency: cereal magnates, don’t do what Special-K did and say you’ll give people crisps for tweets, then belittle them by insisting on having review of copy on said tweets before handing over your sad little bags. In doing so you’re not using tweets as currency – you’re just bribing people to hollowly endorse you. With crisps. And while you’re at it, don’t forget that people can delete their tweets as soon as they’ve licked the salty dust from their fingers. Can’t do that with coins, can they?   

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