The Types of Self-Destructive Corporate Tweets

I assume that everyone in our class knows or might have a twitter account. Twitter is basically a social networking service and microblogging service which allows its users to send messages up to 140 characters or commonly known as “tweets”. I will be honest, I was an early adopter of Twitter and I am enjoying it so much. Through twitter, I can get any kind of information that is relevant to me. I can follow an account that I think suits me well.

I suppose the pattern of twitter user has been changing. Nowadays, not only the individual people who have twitter account, corporate has also been using twitter as a media to interact or communicate with their consumers. Similar with other platforms of social media, Twitter is like two-edged sword, on one hand, it can be useful to enhance the brand awareness and build a good relationship with consumers but on the other hand, Twitter also has a potential to destruct the brand image of a company.

In case you missed our class yesterday, Wags also discussed about the twitter mistakes made by corporate. The mistake was made by Brown Brothers, a wine company from Australia posted an aggressive tweet towards its customers and eventually led to an extensive twitter war between Brown Brother and wine writers in Australia.

Yes. Aggressive tweet is obviously considered as one of twitter mistakes but there are other several mistakes that corporate should bear in their mind.

According to Jay Baer, there are several types of corporate tweets that cause heartburn such as:

• Wrong Pipes: This mistake happens when the administrators of company twitter account mistakenly posted a tweet that he or she intended to post from their personal individual twitter account.  Famous example can be taken from American Red Cross case (See the above picture).
• Tone Deaf: This occurs when the official twitter account posts a tweet that is outside customary social or societal norms. Example can be seen from the screenshot below where Kenneth Cole has linked the chaotic situation in Egypt with his new Spring collection and it has offended almost everyone on twitter.

Based on the facts above, it is a must for corporate to use Twitter carefully as their marketing tool in order not to fall into the same hole like companies that mentioned above. 

All right, I have mentioned several Twitter mistakes made by corporate and I am sure there are still a lot of examples of backfire effect from Twitter. What do you guys have in your mind? any other examples? Please do share it with me.

Cheers,

Ivan