In the dumbest marketing stunt you’ll ever read about, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill based student startup decided to promote itself by sending out a fake school shooting alert, impersonating the university’s emergency messaging system.
UNC based startup Bevii, which makes an app for some sort of micro, location-based social network sent out this promotional email to students on Tuesday:
Sure it may have started with “report of innovation,” but I’m pretty sure the first thing students read was “shots were fired.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Seung Hui Cho gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech in one of the worst mass murder incidents in the country’s history. You can imagine how using a school shooting themed promotional email could be seen in bad taste despite it’s attempt at being “disruptive” or rebellious against the old social media guard.
The stunt, rightfully and soundly criticized by students and faculty, managed to get Bevii banned from UNC’s servers.
Idiots.
