KitchenAid Cooks Up A Twitter Blunder; How Brands and Social Media Managers Can Minimize PR Blowback
October 5th, 2012 | Published in Our Industry: Slay Blog
By Miles Gaudet, October 5, 2012
I am constantly checking in with all my social media engagement during the day and on into the night. The only lax is when I’m driving or happen to be set on fire. I won’t stop say, even when the candidates for U.S. Presidency are outlining why they should be in control of the country.
I was taking the usual grief from my parents about my constant connectivity to my device when I spotted Copywriter, Orioles supporter, and all around nice guy Eammon Azizi (@eammon) tweet this:
I couldn’t imagine KitchenAid ever tweeting anything political, much less an insensitive joke about someone’s passing; yet, after clicking on their profile, there it was amongst the pictures of mixers and a background of a perfect kitchen.
The offensive tweet only stayed up on the page for a matter of minutes, but had already circulated around with re-tweets and mentions galore. Having seen the twitter blunders of Kenneth Cole, Nestle and Chrysler in the past, I was expecting the usual attacks from the twittersphere and vanilla apologies from the large faceless brand.
I was pleasantly surprised in being completely false, at least about the brand’s reaction.
KitchenAid immediately took the tweet down and within minutes issued this apology:
It was impressive to see the apology take place on the same medium and using the hashtag feature correctly, attempting to build credibility with its upset audience. KtichenAid then put a real person in front of the crisis, took responsibility and issued another apology:
And if that wasn’t enough crisis management, when followers started firing shots and popular, up-to-the-second publications like Mashable and AdWeek started reporting the story, Soledad reached out to specific agencies directly to go “on record” about the incident in order to amend the stories:
The take-home here is to learn how to not tweet – social media managers, that’s for you – and how to most-effectively deal with a public relations crisis: apologize appropriately, take responsibility and get try and get ahead of the curve.
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