Vodafone's Twitter debacle and what brands can learn from it
08 Feb 2010
Category: News
Source:
What happens when a major brand's Twitter feed starts delivering messages that are decidedly off brand? Well that's what happened on Friday to UK mobile phone network Vodafone.
Early in the afternoon a member of the company's social media team posted a homophobic remark via the company's Twitter feed (twitter.com/vodafoneuk). Vodafone, which uses the feed mainly to talk to its customers and give them advice about tariffs etc, had amassed over 8500 followers.
It is not the first time that a brand has become a cropper via its Twitter account. In summer 2009 Habitat fell foul of the Twitter community by using a hashtag (these are used to help people searching for specific items on Twitter) with Iran (which was then a hot news story) on tweets that highlighted its latest ranges and offers.
After taking a beating from the Twitter community with literally thousands of tweets criticising the brand the company responded by blaming the indiscretion on an intern. The company has since apologised and restarted its twitter activity (twitter.com/habitatUk) Vodafone however took a more proactive role in responding to the tweet. It firstly deleted the tweet, though it had been retweeted so many times that it was still easily accessible to the Twitter community. It then apologised to anyone who had retweeted the remark.
The net result was this made Vodafone's Twitter feed look like one long grovelling apology.
Since the incident social media advisors have been making suggestions as to how brands, and Vodafone in particular, should respond when Twitter goes wrong. Here's a round-up then of how brands should handle their Twitter accounts.
1. Make sure the person handling the Twitter feed understands your brand values. Getting the intern to do it is like letting an editorial assistant run a magazine.
2. If you control the Twitter account think before your tweet. Tweeters need to constantly ask themselves 'how is what I am about to share with the community going to impact on my company?'
3. If something goes wrong own up as quickly as possible. One of the big criticisms of Habitat was that it took a while before admitting its mistake
4. If things do go wrong only apologise once. Vodafone should simply have said sorry and not tweeted for the rest of the day. It could even have posted a statement elsewhere and put a link to that statement on its Twitter account.
