AUBURN HILLS, Mich. – Chrysler was a shocked as anyone to find this tweet coming from their Twitter account:
This Chrylser tweet resulted in the firing of Chrysler's agency
“I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive.” The tweet was posted by an employee of New Media Strategies – the company Chrysler employed to help them with social media.
This employee was fired by New Media Strategies and then the agency suffered the same fate as Chrysler let them go.
The employee mistakenly thought he was posting this to his personal Twitter account rather than the Chrysler account.
As I’ve professed all along, you need to act as if your mother is watching you. Assume that whatever you post will be seen by everyone. Then, if you do make a minor mistake (e.g. posting to the wrong account) the damage is minimal.
Also this should wake companies up to taking the majority of their social media activity in-house. This was not good timing for Chrysler whose new slogan is “Imported from Detroit.”
Being a Detroit native myself I can say that the drivers are great compared to the other cities I’ve visited and lived in.
Eric,
This article drew a tremendous amount of “comment spam” (I’m guessing because of your undoubtedly high page-rank).
Don’t you moderate these ??? Some of them are blatantly obvious and a good many are damn illiterate.
- John
Many thanks for making the effort to discuss this, I feel strongly about this and love learning a great deal more on this subject. If feasible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your weblog with a great deal more details? It’s really helpful for me.
Great article Erik, thanks for sharing. I find it absurd to someone working with marketing to have such a low level of communication. It does not really matter if is over Twitter, Facebook or in real life. I believe that If you have nothing good to say, just don’t say it.
Aouch! I do have sympathy for the guy… I’ve done the same thing a couple of times but luckily corrected it shortly after. Managing +20 twitter profiles can be confusing sometimes.
I suggest to keep you personal profiles on an other social media dashboard than your professional ones. But then again, where do you draw the line?
My friend and I were debating this because in some ways, this begs the need for a social media management tool with an approvals process. However, on the other hand, an approvals process defeats the purpose of fast/easy communication that social media needs. In this case, I think it’s just a case of one bad apple, but it does show that social media channels need to be manned by experienced and trustworthy people.
On one hand yes… But on the other look how much publicity it’s getting them.
Never forget that branding extends beyond your internal staff!
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That’s happened to me before, tweeting from the wrong account I mean. It’s a lesson you only have to learn once, but still, costly ouch for the agency in the end.
Yikes! That was one expensive tweet for both the author and agency. I would not want to be there this morning!
I teach my students the basics: don’t do online what you don’t do off line….easy….but social media education is necessary…especially when you’re not a digital native (and probly also for the digital native
)