What Twitter is learning from the first social media-driven Olympics
Skift Take
The combination of viral, confessional social media and the locked-down environment of the most corporate Olympics ever is producing quite the sideshow this time around.
In an embarrassing stumble during one of its biggest turns on the world stage, Twitter admitted Tuesday it wrongly shut down a British journalist's account after he taunted NBC, Twitter's Olympics partner, in a tweet.
How far its apology goes to mollify thousands of angry Twitter users remains to be seen. What's clear is that for about 48 hours, instead of being the vehicle for news about the Olympics, the San Francisco-based company was the news.
"It's a marketing nightmare" for the company, said Brian Solis, principal analyst for the Altimeter Group and author of "The End of Business as Usual."
The controversy started Sunday when the account of Guy Adams, a correspondent for The Independent and a vocal critic of NBC's Olympics coverage, was suspended after he tweeted a corporate email address for a network executive, which Twitter claimed was a violation of its privacy rules.
Twitter restored his account Tuesday, admitting that "we did mess up" when its staff encoura
