Reasons to closely monitor your twitter account

A Vodafone employee posted an offensive message this afternoon which read “Is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver”

This was sent out to Vodafone’s 8,663 followers. Vodafone has since apologised to its followers and says the employee in question has been suspended.

Vodafone are not the first company to be embarrased by their twitter account

Habitat returned to Twitter in September last year with a message, “We’re back. Sorry it took so long. This time we want to get it rightt. Tell us what you want to hear from us and we’ll mark suggestions in our favourites.”

Habitat was criticised for using Twitter site to spam the community back in June. It used hash tags, which help users track conversations on the microblogging site, to promote marketing messages that had no relevance to the topics used. Habitat’s defence was that the campaign was a mistake and the posts were made by an intern.

However, HabitatUK, was putting out marketing messages such as ‘Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!’ on Friday, using tags such as #mms, #Apple, #iPhone and even used an Iranian election hashtag #Mousavi.

Although all the messages were replaced with sales and marketing tweets, the damage had already been done. Many Twitters already saw the messages and tweeted their annoyance.

This is a classic example of how a big brand such as Habitat was unable to execute a social media idea successfully. They jumped on the twitter band wagon too soon without truly understanding the full damage it could do if implemented incorrectly.

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