Vodafone Australia censored

Vodafone doesn't want their staff talking about the new Samsung Galaxy tablet and that includes you on the social media team!

Self CensorshipFollowing the leak one day early of the new Samsung Galaxy tablet in Sydney in a video and promoted heavily via an article on SMH.com.au, it seems that Vodafone corporate head office wasn’t as ready to talk about the new device as a blogger on their social media team. The Vodafone social media was over eager to start promoting news about the new Samsung Galaxy but had to retract their blog post because the Samsung product has not been official released.  I’ve had one request in the past from a client to remove blog posts discussing a product that is not yet officially released and actually still hasn’t been technically launched so it might still be a sore point, I will avoid at this time…

The issue with censorship around blogs when discussing a relevant product that has been seen and is due for release, it’s not the case of hearsay and promotion of the device is likely to benefit Vodafone when its official launched. The self censorship cannot help the difficult task that the social media team has and it doesn’t promote trust in their ability to do their work if there is limited support from head office and it really clouds the transparency perspective social media is able to provide for companies.  Overall the removal of the post is a very unsettling to have the power taken out of your hands by a supplier, it’s not as if they are Apple and will take it personally.

It’s very interesting to see that corporate head office was so quick to respond and they censored their bloggers with such a heavy-handed approach, its likely that they have done more damage by this reaction and a very public failure. You can see the error page that was left after the post was retracted, it would have made more sense to add in a teaser message or if they really didn’t want to further promote the leaked video, they could have redirected the blog post to Vodafone’s listing of Samsung devices currently available.

A spokesperson for the company said it had told its social media team to remove the post as the product had not yet been released

Most marketing efforts to self censor or retract something once its public leads to more negative press and often provides more coverage around the topic that they tried to censor, but its great to see that this time the device wasn’t left in a bar.  Seriously using the device on a public commuter train has to make you think that someone might notice such as another tech blogger from Electronista and record the whole event on video. My last thoughts on the aggressive reaction are that maybe Vodafone may not be an initial launch partner and have taken all steps to try to limit promotion of a product they are not able to sell….