Cristiano Ronaldo Social Media #Fail Case Study

Jul 9, 2010 by     164 Comments    Posted under: Social Media

Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo: Is he really using Twitter and Facebook?

Celebrities have been attracted to Twitter and Facebook  for some time now and some have managed to master it (Alyssa Milano) and others have failed miserably (Miley Cyrus).

Today another high profile Twitter user joins the list of celebrities that, to put it bluntly, have made  an ass of themselves by not being able to understand what social media is all about: Please welcome Cristiano Ronaldo and his geo-location troubles.

The Real Madrid player, and former best player in the world, opened his Twitter account and Facebook page recently, integrated in the wave of players that joined Twitter along with FIFA’s very special contract with the micro-blogging company  for the World Cup. If high profile football players joining twitter was one of the terms of the deal that got Twitter to embrace football with disastrous results to the platform and user experience it is something that is not public. I for one don’t believe in coincidences.

I also don’t believe that Cristiano Ronaldo himself is using Twitter and/or Facebook. Someone is doing it for him and that someone has no clue to what he/she is doing.

Yesterday, Cristiano Ronaldo (or whoever is managing his account), sent this tweet (Please don’t bother to click since the tweet was deleted some hours after – more on that below)

Cristiano Ronaldo fake Twitter picture update / Christiano

So far so good? Cristiano Ronaldo is just keeping in touch with his followers and taking snapshots of his shopping spree at 5th Avenue, right? Wrong!


The fact that the picture was taken on a very well known avenue in Lisbon (NOT 5th Avenue in NY) was immediately spotted by Luciano Alvarez, a journalist who is a Twitter power user. Before long, another Twitter user, André Ribeiro, spotted where the photo had come from. It was taken in 2007 during the filming of an advertisement for a Portuguese bank.

The person “managing” Cristiano Ronaldo’s social media also uploaded seven photos from 2007 taken at the same time to a Facebook album entitled “NYC Weekend.”*

Why is this wrong?

I don’t think I have to refer the obvious: Cristiano Ronaldo is lying to his followers. I don’t think there is any other way to look at it.

Furthermore, this is typical from an old-media kind of thinking where information was given and not questioned by anyone. Today that kind of practice can no longer survive and it takes only a few minutes until someone spots the flaw and only a few minutes more for #Fail to show along your nickname on thousands of timelines. The only sensible thing to do would be to send a status update apologizing for this and make sure it would not happen again.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. The “solution” that the person behind Cristian0 Ronaldo’s account was possibly the worse one that could have been chosen: The tweet was deleted even if the picture, hosted on Twitpic remained there.

No tweet, no proof of the crime? Forget it! The hundreds of RTs that were made keep that same tweet alive and the fact that the picture was not removed from Twitpic only make deleting that tweet more disastrous, and I am being nice here.

How could this be avoided? Here are some tips.

1. If you don’t know how to use social media to your advantage, get someone to do it for you who understands the medium and understands its pros and cons and uses them to your advantage. Don’t get some amateur to do it. It is like going to play against Spain wearing All Stars and not your Nikes. (Oh wait a minute, some people actually think you did play with All Stars, but that is not the point)

2. Be totally honest with your followers and fans by making it clear that it is not you tweeting or updating the fB page but that someone is doing it for you. That way you can always blame those when the shit hits the fan.

3. Try to tweet yourself once in a while, it is not that difficult. Really: it’s like sending text messages to Paris Hilton, and you can sign it CR7 so everyone knows it is really you and not your ghost writers.

4. In this particular case how hard would it really be to take a picture in New York and post it? Come on! Be authentic and learn something.

* Thanks to Paulo Henriques for pointing that out.

Image credits: Jan Solo via Flickr

Tags: , ,

164 Comments + Add Comment

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>