Putting That Problem To Embed

Recently, we have been working on expanding our audience through social media and digital publications. The director of our nonprofit signed off on this project, which entailed two new positions and a suite of stock photo and web services products. We start integrating social media embedded posts and share links into many of our online publications. One day, the director starts urgently calling and emailing, and ends up yelling at us in person about something “seriously wrong” with a recent story. He keeps saying that the link in the story is broken and no matter where he clicks, it takes him off the page and he can’t figure out how to go back. He also keeps asking why we added “such crap” to the story after he signed off on the content. This all rings alarm bells, and we’re desperately checking the page to see what happened to the code or if someone hacked the site.

Not seeing anything wrong, we ask him to demonstrate. He furiously goes to his computer, opens the story, and clicks on an embedded tweet, which launches Twitter in a separate window. “Why are we including THAT?” he shouts, pointing at some rude comment replying to the original tweet. “And why can’t I read the rest of the story?”

We try our best to explain that he is now on Twitter, he can close the new window, and he’s seeing replies to the Tweet we linked to, not anything that we chose to put online. He doesn’t understand and insists that we remove the offensive comment. Eventually, we just had to stop using embedded tweets because he freaked out each time and could not understand that we can’t control comments on a site that’s not ours.