When Social Media Marketing Goes Bad!
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Fri, Aug 12, 2011
Social media is obviously here to stay, and most of us want to embrace it enthusiastically. But marketing in such an open medium always comes with risks, and this lately we have seen a number of strong examples of what happens when social media gets out of your control.
Fox News Twitter Hijacked
This week, the twitterverse nearly exploded when @FoxNewsPolitics, the political stream of Fox news tweets, posted up a succession of tweets claiming President Barack Obama had been assassinated on 4th July. Needless to say, it took only a few microseconds for the tweets to be declared a hoax, but not before some small panic had erupted. After realizing the stream had been hacked, meaning some outside element had gotten a hold of the account in some way or another, twitter users waited for a statement from Fox news admitting the hack and removing the tweets. And then they waited some more. All in all, it was many hours before the offending tweets were removed, and another while before a statement was released. This gave the rest of us lots of time to log on a see the tweets live, and also for some of us to take a screenshot (see below).
What Should Fox News Have Done?
In the current social media universe, we are aware it is possible for things to go wrong and sometimes things can get hacked. But how you follow up on these incidents is how you will be judged, and it is important to practice good online PR. To think a large corporation like Fox News left their twitter feed unmanned and uncorrected for such a long time raises questions about their credibility. The lesson here is to always follow up as quickly as possible when something on your social media portfolio goes awry, or risk reputational damage.
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