Yesterday Vodafone found itself in a troublesome situation when its corporate Twitter account was posted to by what seems to be a disgruntled employee in its customer service department.
As soon as the message was posted Vodafone had hundreds of messages wondering if their account had been hacked and complaints about the content of the tweet. Of course lots of apologies then had to be distributed to all the offended people to try to save face, and apparently the employee has been suspended.
But in today’s social media world … where does the line get drawn between not policing your corporate social media profiles properly and attempting to create some link bait. It seems that due to this unsolicitored tweet they have picked up an extra 800 followers (nice!)
8 Comments
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Yeah may not be all bad for Vodafone, but still very unprofessional of the employee who did it.
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Its nice to have an example to put in front of clients to suggest why online rep management might just be useful
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I think Vodafone should use security option as result he can control his ORM
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It was interesting to read Vodafone’s comments within the Econsultancy blog entry (http://econsultancy.com/blog/5401-the-horror-the-horror-vodafoneuk-s-social-media-balls-up) which goes to show that, whether or not this was a genuine tweet by someone real, they’re getting lots of linkbait. it’s interesting that this debate is even present considering people’s nature to manipulate what goes on to make a brand look good.
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Kudos to them for having the guts to do it if it was link bait, it’s certainly generated a lot of press coverage! I’m not so sure that all press is good press though, and I’m confident Vodafone’s higher ups won’t see it that way, so I’d be surprised if this was anything more than a horrible mistake.
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I would hope that they would be smarter than to go that extreme with linkbait. I think a huge part of reputation management in the future will also be security of profiles as there have been some major problems recently with social media profiles being hacked through brute force hacks and keyloggers.
- 8
A lot of corporations aren’t taking Twitter seriously in the way they take what is presented through their website, which is why they are willing to give a few people editorial control over their account.
For the person who used the login details this would seem to be what I’d call a ‘career limiting move’.
For Vodafone no real damage has been done. But maybe they’ll be more careful with their Twitter login details now.
From looking at screenshots, its more like 400 – but still…