10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media

So, you want to embarrass your company with your efforts in social media, and you don't have a lot of time. You could invent an original way to screw up and let everyone else learn from your mistakes, but that would require effort. Instead, you want something easy that you know will work. What you need are best practices identified by early adopters. Follow their examples, and you can have your very own blogstorm.

10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media

1. Create a fake blog. Nobody will notice, and even if they do, they won't remember.

2. Dare bloggers to complain about you. Because, you know, nobody reads blogs.

3. Broadcast your press releases to bloggers. They love that.

4. Flame a blogger critic in email, because that way it will stay between you and the blogger.

5. Impersonate someone else in blog comments. That transparency stuff is overrated.

6. In any dispute, lead with the lawyers. They can take care of everything for you.

7. If you want good reviews of your expensive product, send free samples to bloggers. You don't need to mention anything about disclosure.

8. Oh, heck, just review your own products. You know them better than anyone else, anyway.

9. Make improvements to your company's Wikipedia entry. After all, it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, right?

10. Tout your company's stock on the message boards. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.

Once you've mastered these techniques, you'll be ready to move on to advanced topics, such as bomb jokes and bad music. Really, there's no shortage of ways to screw up. Between the honest mistakes and the creative scams, we'll eventually discover all of them.

All we ask is that you let us be the first to blog about it when you invent a new one.