RED CROSS SAGA

Sometimes social media can be the cause of a PR crisis. Just take this Twitter snafu that the American Red Cross quickly handled back in 2011. This is every marketer and social media monkey’s worst nightmare: accidentally firing off a personal tweet on the company’s Twitter account. This kind of thing can happen easily when one is using Hootsuite on a mobile phone, for example (which is exactly what happened here). Red Cross responded brilliantly. The rogue tweet from @RedCross went like this:

“Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer… when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd”

You can imagine how a tweet of this nature would make an honorable humanitarian organization look bad. How did Red Cross respond? With transparency, humor and good grace.

Now, deleting a tweet isn’t always the best idea since a) if you have a big audience who notices these things, it can look shady when you delete things and b) anything “deleted” can surface to haunt you later, especially on social media. But, Red Cross did the right thing by acknowledging that the tweet went out, they deleted it, and explaining with humor that it was all a mistake. It never turned into a major crisis.

They didn’t stop there, though. Red Cross went beyond that response and turned a potentially harmful tweet into an opportunity for engagement. They took to their corporate blog to explain the situation, show their humanity, and engage with fans and followers. The employee who made the mistake ‘fessed up to it on her personal Twitter account in the same manner, with humility and humor.

In the first place firing off a personal on twitter is not the best of practice . I was surprise to my research and can only imagine what triggered this decision. This situation easily be avoided if only the PR /social media manager followed the right procedure.

Lesson learned

Be careful using Hootsuite! And, be honest with your fans/followers when you goof. Social media folks are very forgiving, as long as you don’t use dishonest tactics to hide your mistakes. That is the ultimate no-no when handling crises through social media (or offline too, for that matter!)