PR win as Vodafone deftly handle fallout from offensive tweet
The faces at Vodafone must have been as red as their logo when that now infamous and plain offensive tweet pictured above went out on the @VodafoneUK feed on Twitter.
It was immediately deleted and had it not been a household name it might just have ended there! However, within seconds it had been retweeted hundreds of times, then thousands and soon it was viral; many were linking to pictures of the offending tweet. The foul mouthed kitty was way beyond the sack of denial!
Vodafone quickly apologised on the same feed and in an instant quashed rumours that the account had been hacked. Many had assumed it was the only way this would happen, which may seem generous, but a security breach would have been more damaging for Vodafone.
It turned out to be a (suspended and presumably soon to be ex) employee who pounced on an unattended terminal and mistakenly thought they were tweeting on someone’s personal account. Which sounds plausible! Accidently tweeting on the wrong account on something like Tweetdeck seems more likely! Or a direct message that went public instead of staying private.
Anyway, having admitted the apology, @VodafoneUK went on to publicly tweet each and every person who had retweeted the offending and personally, if repetitively, apologise. In terms of crisis management this was a clever move and was largely well received – an even better approach would to have been to check the profile page of each Twitter account and then personally address the public tweet. This would have been even more impactive.
Yes, it got blogged about lots, but Vodafone’s prompt action, combined with it happening late on a Friday afternoon allowed the company to escape relatively unscathed. There was a lot of sympathy among most of those tweeting for most of us have that tee-shirt, admittedly not so plain offensive, but who among us has not hastily deleted a tweet that was supposed to be a private direct message?
Incidentally, deleting a post is something easily done via the profile page on your Twitter account, and if you beat the Google indexing of Twitter then it might just disappear entirely. If however it registers on someone’s Tweetdeck for example, you might just need to address the mistake.
It was certainly better handled than the heavy handed sacking of a Vodafone marketer who entered into the social media spirit and offered to help a rival in Hungary with technical problems.
Finally, what did entertain me about this who episode was the number of tweets that were incensed, not by the offensive content as much as the poor grammar, especially that wayward apostrophe! If you find your business has tweeted something that is creating a backlash you need not fret alone! Give Morgan PR a call – or direct message @nigel_morgan if we are following one another – and we can help.