In a classic example of how not to respond to social media criticism, Argyle and Bute Council in Scotland was forced into a confusing climb down on Friday, after provoking a worldwide backlash by banning a nine year old girl from photographing her school dinners to post on her blog.
In Martha Payne’s NeverSeconds blog, the schoolgirl documented and rated her lunch every day, scoring her meals out of ten on a ‘Food-o-meter’, and noting important information like how many mouthfuls and how many stray hairs the food contained.
According to the girl’s father, the school were supportive after the blog attracted unexpected attention from around the world, recording some 2 million hits.
However, the local council took a dimmer view, and asked the school’s headmaster to ban Martha from taking photographs in the cafeteria area.
“This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office,” she wrote on her blog on Thursday. “I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.
“I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too,” she continued. “I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals [a charity for disadvantaged kids] either.”
Is that the sound of a gathering outrage-tsunami I hear?
Not only upsetting a cute, nine year old girl for doing something clever, but taking money away from her charity too; if Argyle and Bute Council couldn’t smell a crap storm on the horizon at this point, they were about to catch one full in the face.
Once the news broke, an army of tweeters, including UK food crusader Jamie Oliver, threw their weight behind Martha’s cause and their ire at Argyle and Bute Council. An ill advised statement from the council claimed that the blog “misrepresented the options and choices available”; adding that media coverage of the blog had “led catering staff to fear for their jobs”.
It should be noted that the cause of the dinner ladies’ distress was an article in local tabloid The Daily Record, which carried the headline, “Time to fire the Dinner Ladies”. Good work there….
On Friday, following a substantial outcry at Martha’s censorship, council leader Roddy McCuish told the BBC that he had instructed officials to remove the ban.
At the time of writing this, #NeverSeconds is trending at number one globally on twitter, Mary’s Meals just giving page is nudging £30,000, and Argyle and Bute Council’s media managers are checking how much hair they’ve lost over the past 24 hours.
But nasty tabloid journalism, PR folly and upset dinner ladies aside, there were surely an almost infinite number of ways that the council could have supported Martha in her journalistic endeavours, while cheekily cashing in on the PR and social media value she had so ably generated.
What would you have done in their place?
