Poor old @VodafoneUK have fallen victim to the dangers of social media - and boy have they done it in style(!!) On Friday afternoon, someone posted this homophobic remark on their @VodafoneUK twitter feed to their 8500+ followers.
Ouch.
Disgruntled employee perhaps? Or ‘innocent’ mistake posting to the wrong account? After all the apologising that they did, it seems it was a “A severe breach of rules by staff in our building“. Either way, despite their swift attempts to delete the tweet, it had been re-tweeted and captured for posterity for all to see. A quick Google now shows over 1,200 results for the exact offending phrase.
Interestingly, the blunder gave them a bit of a boost in followers. People wanting to witness in person their next public fail? Hmmm…
Just goes to show that measuring social media success by number of followers alone isn’t appropriate! I guess Friday’s incident just highlights the power and speed of social media. And the inability to retract our digital utterances, thanks to it’s real-time and re-publishable nature. Social media can be quickly damaging to a brand if care isn’t taken.
In this increasingly socially digital world of ours, brands are being forced to be more open, more honest and more able to engage in real-time conversations. All power to the consumer! Not since the birth of the internet itself has something had such a levelling effect on the way we all communicate.
Of course, social media is here to stay and it will reap significant benefits to those who use it well. And for those who don’t? Well, they’ll probably be left out on the street - presumably like that Vodafone employee.
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Social media is all around us and brands are increasingly attempting to leverage its power in influencing consumers. There’s a lot of nervousness in jumping in though, since engagement in social media can easily back-fire, as Belkin recently discovered when it attempted to influence online shoppers to buy its products.
As e-consultancy recently reported…
“Belkin, which manufactures computer accessories and electronics equipment, has learned this the hard way. It has come under fire after
it was discovered that one of its employees attempted to use Amazon’s
crowdsourcing service,
Mechanical Turk, to generate positive online reviews for its routers.
Arlen Parsa of The Daily Background broke the news after discovering the Mechanical Turk task posted by a a person named Mike Bayard. He used LinkedIn to confirm that Bayard was a Belkin employee.
Bayard’s posting requested that Mechanical Turk users:
- “Always give a 100% rating (as high as possible)“
- “Write as if you own the product and are using it“
- “Thank the website for making you such a great deal“
- “Mark any other negative reviews as ‘not helpful’ once you post yours“
In return for each online review, the fake reviewers would be paid 65 cents.”
Belkin’s CEO responded saying they didn’t know it was happening. Hmmm….
One of the lessons we can take out from this is that openness and honesty are key! Without it, you risk causing damage to your brand. In our ever-connected, ever-online world it’s all too easy to be caught out.
It’s also important to develop clear rules of engagement which govern how the brand engages within social media spaces - this ensures the risks are minimised and gives content authors guidelines on how they should behave in different circumstances.
As part of the Creston Digital Forum, we’re running a seminar on social media where we’re inviting clients to come & listen to our view on how to engage. More details will follow…
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