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What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

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Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#42
Of late Amazon has been working hard internally to improve its company image. There are frequent emails about reviewing Amazon on glass door, they also provide images of the Amazon smiley and encourage employees to use this as a background on their social media profiles. They encourage employees to follow and retweet the Amazon news handle on Twitter. So this one does not seem organic and is part of Amazon drive to improve the image about working culture, definitely pr.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#43
Let's say you're a company with a serious PR problem about the working conditions in your warehouses.

You set up 15 Twitter accounts claiming to be employees of your warehouses. You make sure the accounts are laughably bad at concealing the fact that they are shills, with cookie-cutter bios and responses that are obviously canned talking points. This ensures that the accounts are discovered and written up by various publications, and the articles widely shared.

The articles, while laughing at how transparently phony the accounts are, inevitably mention that you are now offering tours of your warehouses (which makes you sound trustworthy since you're not hiding anything), and embed the Tweets that say you pay more than other companies in your industry and offer medical benefits. (Since this information is falsifiable (capable of being proven false, but not necessarily false) it's credible even though it's coming from a shill account.)

You've probably not made anyone's opinion of you worse (you look more stupid than malevolent), but you've gotten your message in front of eyeballs and it might make some people think better of you.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#44

I don't think the ground workers at Amazon: 1. Care about tweeting about their company. 2. Talk like that. However, I think this could be real if: 1. Amazon has some incentive program that basically allows workers to take on a "marketing assignment" for some sort of bonus. If so, how is this different than contriving good reviews about your restaurant on Yelp? 2. Amazon has developed or is paying for third party soft…

> 2. Amazon has developed or is paying for third party software that lets their PR people quickly manage and create activity on multiple Twitter accounts from a central interface.

I feel like this would be infinitely cheaper, more quantifiable and easier to set concrete milestones/targets for their campaigns than telling employees to tweet on Amazon's behalf and hoping for the best.

All it takes is for one of these ambassadors to get fired/quit and their pro-Amazon platform becomes an anti-Amazon soapbox.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#45
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it sounds like they did fix them? People used to complain about not getting bathroom breaks and unpleasant temperatures. Either they're lying, or they did fix those things and are informing people of it.

> it sounds like they did fix them On what basis? All we have is PR talking points presented, deceptively, as genuine opinions of real employees. That doesn't seem like evidence.

If you're accusing them of lying, that's fine. But what you claimed was that these are just talking points "instead of" fixing the issues. So, they are claiming they fixed the issues. Are you claiming they are lying about that?

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#46
If someone wanted to prove how social networks can be used to manipulate the stock market, this would be an excellent mechanism for doing so. Set up a bunch of droid bots for your competitor and then watch the press eat them alive.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#48

I wonder if the recruiters for these “totally optional roles” are the sort who would also provide helpful reminders that wearing 15 pieces of flair is just the bare minimum. > Look, we want you to express yourself, okay? Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, okay? You do want to express yourself, don't you? -- Office Space, 1999 I can al…

You seem very disturbed about a hypothetical situation you made up.

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#49

If you're taking anything on twitter seriously, then there is a problem. There is no signal in that noise.

It's completely coincidental that its got a 22B mkt cap, you're so right. Just noise!

Ah, I see you've learned quite well from them!

Re: What is this Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work?

#50
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it sounds like they did fix them On what basis? All we have is PR talking points presented, deceptively, as genuine opinions of real employees. That doesn't seem like evidence.

If you're accusing them of lying, that's fine. But what you claimed was that these are just talking points "instead of" fixing the issues. So, they are claiming they fixed the issues. Are you claiming they are lying about that?

Plenty of untrue statements are asserted as fact in good faith and without intention to deceive. Asking for evidence is not the same thing as an accusation of dishonesty.
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