What went wrong with Nissan’s Reddit ‘ask me anything’
Cherry-picked answers and accusations of planted questions derailed the online Q and A session as soon as it began.
We can all learn a few valuable lessons from Nissan, whose recent Reddit AMA (ask me anything) went “horribly wrong,” according to multiple sources.
AMAs on Reddit tend to be wildly popular. For the uninitiated, it works like this: Someone famous or noteworthy goes on the site and opens up a forum saying (with some variation here and there), “Hello. My name is ______. Ask me anything.”
That person is subsequently hit with a barrage of questions, the most popular of which are “upvoted” to the top.
For marketers, this presents a potential problem, which Nissan found out the hard way. The brand had its CEO, Carlos Ghosn, sit for an AMA earlier this week.
From the onset, it didn’t go as planned.
The problem with the AMA from a brand standpoint is that you can’t control the questions. When I popped in during the AMA, the top questions were about the fact that the company does not own the domain Nissan.com, and is currently in litigation with the owner in an attempt to wrest control.
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