Learning from Vodafone to Keep It Clean

By February 7 2010, 6:38 pm 2 Comments
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Last week’s Twitter comment by a Vodafone employee was unfortunate.


 


To be honest, something like this was bound to happen. But one rogue Tweet in amongst millions of corporate others doesn’t make social media some kind of danger area to be avoided.


 


Business owners shouldn’t panic but just take a step back to review their procedures, training, password protection and strategy, to minimize something like this happening to them.


 


What doesn’t seem clear is whether it was a disgruntled employee or one who just flicked the wrong switch.


 


What we do with @MSAdvertising is separate our personal accounts from applications we use for working the corporate feed.


 


Keeping the company and personal accounts clean and free of each other would be one step in the right direction, making it difficult for staff to tweet the wrong thing to the wrong followers.

  • Nick Corston

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    But it’s still prone to human error/mischiefness – the ‘company’ is still run by ‘staff’. Vodafone is a company of real ‘people’ and this person was a member of the customer service team, and as such empowered to talk to customers. He may even have expressed similar attitudes1:1 to people on the phone, but in this case Twitter acted as a mega mega phone!

    Dangerous stuff for sure and reinforcement of the need for care that must be taken when handling social media.

    It all comes down to brand position/reputation – a brand that is generally liked by its customers and trusted can probably get away with things like this as there’s no place to hide.

  • Mel Carson

    Of course it’s prone to human error Nick. But that’s the beauty of social media. Humans interacting with humans as opposed to the public dealing with a dry corporate facade.

    The very public nature of Twitter, and the incredible media attention it gets right now, has obviously overblown what happened, but my point is it shouldn’t deter CMOs from using social media.

    There is much talk of the Return On Investment of social, but I once read that what is a potentially greater threat to companies in this new sociable world of ours, is what might be the Return On In-action if they don’t embrace it.

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