How to avoid insulting Kanye West from your brand’s account
After media agency Carat admitted Virgin Australia’s tweet telling Kanye West to ‘EAD’ came about as a result of an error by a junior staff member George Photios looks at how companies can avoid the same thing happening to them.
There have been plenty of misfires on social recently, the most recent being Virgin’s overtly honest tweet to Kanye West. However, with users having access to so many accounts across so many properties it’s easy to post the wrong content to the wrong page.
Whether you’re from within an agency posting to multiple clients’ accounts, or working client-side on multiple properties, it can get quite confusing. But there are a few simple processes which can remove much of the risk.
Why would you ever want to avoid this? I’m flying VA for the rest of my life for doing this.
Appropriate process and governance and use appropriate social publishing technology where possible.
We’ve developed a proprietary system that publishes to each social media account. Including Instagram. With options like filtering swear words and specific keywords and approval from management on every post before it goes live.
There’s absolutely no reason why there should not be an approval workflow for a corporate account for a prominent brand with such a high reach.
How about using different apps for different accounts? Hootsuite/Tweetdeck for professional profiles then use the native Facebook/Twitter/Instagram apps for personal.
“Junior staff especially are not too familiar with navigating around a social network and can make these errors quite easily.”
What crap is this? Some Gen X telling us that the social media generation can’t navigate social media?
PS Mike – too true
It’s time businesses stopped leaving social responsibilities to ‘juniors’ and ‘interns’ full stop.
Brilliant, as always George. But I have to agree with Mike!
VA should have just claimed it rather than making Carat publicly apologise and throw their junior staffer under the bus – a typical move. It made me laugh a lot. I feel like this rarely happens (correct me if there’s been some more recent examples!) and that staff handling social accounts for brands are paranoid about this type of thing anyway.
I am writing this post from the Virgin Lounge in Melbourne and toasting a beer to whoever made the post; good work madam / sir! #virginforlife (flying with)
the tweet was posted before 6pm on Tuesday so it doesn’t sound like the beer fridge was the culprit. The suggestions above are all good, but until robots can be taught to tweet humorous yet appropriate stuff that gets lots of engagement, these incidents are inevitable. If it was an accident its a shame if the person(s) is hung out to dry- we can all make a mistake like this when you think about it.
Seems like the Pratfall Effect in play