For anyone who has been listening to the ridiculously popular (and addictive) podcast Serial – where a journalist looks into the case of 18 year old Adnan Syed who was charged and imprisoned for strangling his ex girlfriend Hae Min Lee – the word ‘Best Buy’ will ring a bell.
So the company tweeted something pretty inappropriate to boost their sales. For context, the ‘parking lot’ (translation: car park, for anyone in the UK struggling with the linguistic barrier) of Best Buy is where Adnan Syed allegedly strangled his ex girlfriend, before making a call on a payphone to his friend Jay to come and pick him up/help him out.
The case against Adnan basically sprung from Jay’s testimony, which includes a payphone, but the thing is – journalist Sarah Koenig found out that there is no record of a payphone at the Best Buy. So you can see how inappropriate it is for the company to tweet, ‘We have everything you need, unless you need a payphone #serial.’
Hey! Let’s capitalise on something the world is listening to that mentions us as being the murder scene of an 18-year-old girl and do a funny tweet about it! Hahahaha really funny guys. And really insensitive.
And another example of how some people (now including the social media manager of Best Buy) are treating Serial as some sort of fictionalised series, or at the very least, getting so into the whole thing that they’re forgetting it's a real story. And real families are affected. And tweeting stuff like that just makes you look really, really bad. Since then, they’ve apologised over two tweets trying to explain why they did what they did, and of course deleted the original tweet:
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.