One of the benefits of being on social media is that you can say exactly what you want to as many people as possible. One of the downsides is that if you mess up, you have just messed up in front of as many people as possible. That is where we have landed in todays blog; the art of failure. There is a tremendous amount of examples on the internet today of what can happen when a company or personal account says the exact wrong thing on social media. I will be providing images under the examples to clarify what I am speaking of.
Most Americans know of the red haired lady fast food restaurant chain called “Wendy’s”. Well what some people don’t know is that Wendy’s is notorious on twitter with their hilarious clap-backs mainly focused towards another restaurant chain called “McDonalds”.
Let me give you an example:
The best word to describe Wendy’s as is bold. They have a stance on social media and their food isn’t bad either. They have a big following and know how to captivate an audience. Unfortunately that means that when they mess up there is a bigger audience to see that as well. When they mess up it will be huge. Luckily for them it hasn’t happened yet.
The New England Patriots had an “oops” moment in 2014 when they were trying to reward their followers on the social media site called “Twitter”. It all began Thursday morning, when the Patriots tweeted they were celebrating reaching 1 million followers by thanking fans with “custom digital Pats jerseys.” The “custom digital jersey” was actually a photo of the back of a Patriots jersey displaying a fan’s Twitter handle where the player’s name appears. So if your Twitter handle is, say, @ILoveCookies, you got a tweet from the Patriots account that included a photo of the jersey with @ILoveCookies on the back, along with a thank-you note. But what if the Twitter handle contains a racial slur? The Patriots didn’t think that through. When a Twitter user with the name @IHateN*ss asked for a jersey of their own, the Patriots cheerfully responded. “@IHATENSS Thanks for helping with 1 million followers!” the tweet said, along with the promised photo of a Patriots jersey bearing @IHATEN**SS on the back.
Not exactly idea for the NFL team. They responded from the twitter users calling them out by deleting the tweet and issuing an apology to its users. There is a lesson to be learned here. Don’t let a computer AI run your giant social media presence.
ClayMan Media 