The Twitterverse was enraged today after a misguided tweet went out from the @KennethCole account.
Original tweet from the @kennethcole account
An apology was issued relatively quickly, but as with all social media gaffes, the damage was already done, and both bloggers and mainstream news sources had picked up the story.
@kennethcole apology
Subsequently, in true Twitter-schadenfreude, an account, @kennethcolepr, was immediately set live, firing mocking missives such as, “Rolling through Germany? Gestapo by our new Berlin store! #KennethColeTweets.”
What a nightmare for the brand, huh?
This kind of mistake always offends me. Independently of my opinion on the content of the tweet, what is upsetting is that not only does this kind of public #fail scare other brands away from social media efforts, but it also underlines the still slow-to-adopt standard requisite that brand community management strategists should have both journalistic experience and ethics training.
The real-time web is a 24/7 conversation that is being moderated by the entire world. Allowing your brand to join this conversation is, of course, crucial to your marketing and business development efforts.
And while natural communication mistakes will be made — words will sometimes be misconstrued, audiences may not always share in all of your opinions, etc. — there is a level of intelligence, common-sense and intuition that cannot be allowed to fall off your list of imperatives.
We work with brands to create and communicate their voices. Part of this learning process also involves understanding that this commitment of resources to social media is no longer an “also-ran” in marketing budgets.
Allowing unsupervised interns and jr. associates to represent million-dollar companies as first-responders to your internet consumer base (also known as, “the world”), means that you get what you pay for: cheaper, inexperienced monitoring and very likely, the threat of ethical immaturity.
I’m not here to slam Kenneth Cole too hard (and when the dust clears, they are welcome to give us a call if they want to talk Community Management strategy!). If they are a smart company, they will use this public face-plant as a learning-tool (much in the legacy of Domino’s or BP) for carefully reviewing the resourcing, goals and key performance indicators of their social media presence.
Love the line “The real-time web is a 24/7 conversation that is being moderated by the entire world.” I almost think since Twitter has such a “casual” and dare I say “fun” brand feel (it IS called “twitter” after all), that sometimes people lose sight of how powerful it is as a communication platform. And this could translate into people not “thinking before they speak.” Still no excuse for this particular example, however..