I've said it before, and now the GoDaddy debacle gives occasion to say it again. Social media is great, but even the most innovative social media strategy is futile when your company's top management is stupid, malicious, or both.
I have absolutely no idea why GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons thought it was a good idea to post video of his elephant hunt in Zimbabwe on Twitter. Maybe he figured "there's no such thing as bad publicity." His public appearances do tend to have a blustery feel to them. But wow, what a catastrophically bad idea: people love these large, intelligent mammals, which are cute (from a safe distance), especially when the baby elephant holds the mother elephant's tail etc. So by all means, Bob, go ahead and post a video of you shooting a beloved animal that is, frankly, probably worth more than you from the perspective of biological diversity.
Of course, public figures can sometimes get away with doing something stupid or insensitive, provided they're already well-liked: typically you just apologize abundantly, give some money to some charitable concern, and then retreat from the public eye until everyone forgets. But Parsons hadn't exactly accumulated a large store of popular goodwill to draw on: before this his company was known to the public chiefly for its stupid TV ads, whose most salient characteristic was that they were degrading to women. Then, he shoots Babar. I believe two words neatly sum up this sequence of events: PR FAIL.
To give both sides of the story, Parsons did offer a rather thin rationale to offer for shooting an elephant: it was a "rogue" elephant, you see, which had trampled local villagers' crops and thus had it coming, presumably with some kind of official government sanction. However this is dubious at best, since it took place in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe's bankrupt regime would gladly sell a rich foreigner the right to shoot an elephant in exchange for some hard currency. The whole thing is very shady, and people on Twitter weren't buying it.
Even if the whole thing had been above board -- a legitimate culling of a dangerous elephant, which does happen -- I'm still mystified by the decision to post it online. I have a lot of hunters in my family (mostly shootin' ducks'n'deer) and I respect the skill involved, as well as the ethos of killing what you eat. But hunting small game stateside is quite different from hunting endangered species in Africa.
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