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Saturday, April 16, 2011

Corporate Twitter Meltdowns

With the ever-growing use of social media, it seems that companies big and small are falling victim to Twitter meltdowns. The most recent of these events occurred at the fashion house of Marc Jacobs. At around midnight on a Friday, the lone intern who was asked to man the Twitter account made a decision to tweet his frustrations with this assignment and attacked his employer through the corporate account on his last day of work.

Some of the tweets included the following:

“I was asked to do this until we found a replacement… I hate this job. Hope they find someone soon. Robert is so picky! We have presented him with 50 people. He’s not happy.”

“You guys and gals have no idea how difficult Robert is. I am only an intern. My last day is tomorrow. I wouldn't be tweeting this if not!”

“I can call him out! I'm out! Won't work in this town again! I know that! Learned a lot. But, I don't have the energy for what is expected!”

While eruptions of this nature are bound to occur, there are steps that can prevent this type of outburst. At PRowl Public Relations, whenever we implement social media in conjunction with our overall strategy, each tweet and message is carefully reviewed by an account executive to make sure it aligns with the goals of the campaign. While this eliminates errors from planned communications, I would recommend that some companies take this concept a step further by only giving trained employees or executives the ability to post. Doing so would help eliminate general access to an integral communication tool and would ultimately result in the protection of the brand.

For more information about the Twitter meltdown at Marc Jacobs, click here to read the article from Ragan’s PR Daily.

This guest blog was written by PRowl Public Relations staff member Jacob DeChant.

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