By: Kiley Landusky
PR Daily recently posted an article on Instagram’s action toward Madonna’s racy pictures posted on its site. In an effort to tame her wild side it created more attention to the star’s account including her flagrant photographs. Madonna posted a screen shot of the email she received from Instagram on its own site. The email told Madonna that her account had violated Instagram’s community guidelines. This generated over 9,000 likes and unleashed over 2,000 comments criticizing how the site handled the situation. A few of the comments read: “Instagram people….really?” “Stupid @instagram,” and “and Rihanna’s photos are not violating?? Give me a break Instagram Team!”. It would appear that these comments were a negative for Instagram, but were actually only adding more attention to the already booming social media.
Was Instagram simply enforcing its community guidelines or just trying to spark attention? It seems to be the latter. The popular page of Instagram seldom lacks photos of girls posing with cleavage out and/or in minuscule bikinis. The fact that they chose to enforce their rules on a multi-decade sex symbol seems quite odd. The Instagram team may have successfully developed a way to build talk of the site and talk of its photos.
We all know that public relations can get sleazy by use of questionable tactics, such as MTV’s decision to “hack” its own Twitter account. If Instagram is merely attempting to boost its popularity as MTV did, it is doing so in a much cleaner manner. No lies, no posing, no ridiculous scandal; simply enforcing its own rules. Sure, this causes a stir but not the kind of stir that ruins a reputation, just enough to get a few thousand more viewers and to prod its users to generate a lot of comments. With this success story, perhaps Instagram will crack down on celebrity icons breaking their rules more often.
