There’s been a couple of very poor examples of using social media in the UK and Ireland over the past week. In Ireland, it is the turn of the national Gas Company, Bord Gais, for really doing a spectacularly bad job at managing their reputation online. A while back they launched a new campaign to entice customers to switch providers of electricity over to them, in a campaign called The Big Switch, and with this they orchestrated an outreach programme to the online community where they identified 100 “influencers” and met up with them to solicit their feedback. They ran a good offline campaign and garnered quite a bit of online support from the blogosphere over the course of the campaign. They also instigated a Twitter account @TheBigSwitchIrl which did a pretty good job of engaging with the public – the guy who ran the account had a very natural way of interacting with followers and helped organise user participation in Ad shoots and ran competitions. So all that was good.

Then the company lost 75000 details with bank account numbers last week on laptops that were not encrypted when stolen (why they were on laptops in the first place is another question) and all of a sudden they put a gagging order on all social media activities. Obviously people were asking questions to the @TheBigSwitchIrl account, but rather than answering them – the only post they have issued since then has been a link to the press release – other than that there has been no communication on the account. They even reverted to getting the PR agency who deal with the company to start RT the link to the boilerplate press release – and left it to them to answer a few of the questions.

What this tells us is that Bord Gais actually don’t take any of this social media seriously – it was just a marketing ploy to go along with the campaign. And if things get serious (like losing 75000 people details), they will revert back to the old way, which is issue a bland press release and then say nothing, and wait till it all blows over. What they sould have done was start answering questions immediately on twitter, organise for the CEO to get himself onto twitter or some other social channel to answer questions and explain what the situation was, and exactly what would happen if people’s bank accounts started getting hacked, and let people know of all the measures that were now being taken to ensure no details would be unencrypted or kept on laptops, and also answer the legitimate questions that people had in relation to why their details were being downloaded onto laptops (by an apparently irregular process that violated the companies internal rules). But they didn’t and now their social media presence and reputation is very tarnished – it will be very difficult for them to re-start the good work that was done at the beginning. All because they reverted back to old school “tell them nothing” tactics. I think it’s time they started thinking more openly and realise that old style PR lock downs don’t work and people openly talk about what an appaling job you are doing – which hurts your brand.

In the UK, Habitat have done a really good job at damaging their reputation this week. It was noticed by SocialMediaToday that the new HabitatUK twitter account was using trending hashtags to trick users into clicking on their marketing driven tweets. For a big brand to be engaging in this was insane. They were hoping when people went onto twitter search that they would see their link and click through (and hopefully follow them). So Spam. This was wrong on so many levels. Not least because one of the hastags they used was #moussavi who is the main leader of the opposition in Iran which was obviously trending high last week. So basically, someone in Habitat decided to try and piggyback on a political movement where people were getting killed to get a few cheap links – it defies belief. So when this was pointed out, they then went and started trying to delete the posts. But thanks to twitter search, you cannot delete them until they come down off the twitter archive. So they are there for all to see. But rather than come out and hold their hands up and say they made a huge mistake they brazened it out and continued to tweet special offers etc…

Then today, Thusday 25th June, they come out and apologised and said that it was done out of ignorance and they obviously would never use a political issue to garner any benefit from. So at least they had the good grace to go and admit that they had messed up big time. But a couple of people then started asking who was actually doing the tweeting for them, was it an agency and if so why were they using an agency in the first place. Then Habitat come back and announce on the SocialMediaToday site that it was in fact an intern and he’s been fired. Whats amazing is that big organisations do not understand how the online community think. Blaming and firing an intern is nearly as bad as the initial cock-up. They need to take responsibility for their actions and be seen to do so. Why not fire the person who hired and allowed the intern to run roughshoud initally – thats who I’d be firing. And blaming an intern is ridiculous and it shows how little they value and understand social media and the online community in general.

Lessons out of all this, is that big organisations have a long way to travel before they understand how to participate meaningfully with the social web. And its about time that anyone in responsible roles started understanding and stop claiming ignorance – because there’s no excuse. And rather than hiring and firing junior roles for mistakes made, those who do the hiring should step up to the plate.

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Here is the Dominos pizza video that is causing all the stir at the moment. Its pretty grim, you most definitely would not like your take-out getting the same treatment. This was posted up on YouTube over the Easter bank holiday weekend, and by Wednesday had over 600,000 views. Dominos have come out and condemned the video and have fired the employees and say that the police have been notified and that a warrant for their arrest is awaiting. There’s some debate on whether the statement they have posted lacks sensitivity and contrition in general, nor does it address the whole issue of hygiene or the lack of it when it comes to the human part of the process. Other commentary is that Dominos should have posted a response in the medium that the “attack” was posted i.e. video – they should have posted a video apology by someone in authority in the organisation, along with an offer of some sort to try and re-build trust. Because essentially that is what has been ruined here. When you think of Dominos after watching this, you will be hard pressed not to conjure up the image of a couple of bored staff in the kitchen interfering with your food. Dominos have been active on social media channels such as Twitter for a period now. So it is all the more surpising that they have been wrongfooted on how to deal with this video. Which goes to show that even though you can be well versed in the rudiments of using social media tools, when push comes to shove and an organisation is faced with a thorny issue, that they revert back to the old way of handling problems, which inevtiably means lawyers, PR and time. Which does not translate well in to the real-time world of social media. A lesson for all businesses.
UPDATE – CEO of Dominos responds by a video post to apologise for the video. See below.

Also this weekend Amazon got into some trouble with the removal of gay and lesbian related literature. A major brouhaha erupted on Twitter tracked by the hashtag #Amazonfail which topped the daily twitter trends keeping it in full view. Amazon eventually came out and gave a fairly mild response to the controversy saying that it was a glitch and they were dealing with it. Surprisingly this did little if nothing to calm the whole affair. The lesson to be learnt from all this for brands is that they need to be listening to what is being said about them 24/7 and when re-acting to a crisis (real or perceived) to dispense with the PR spin and respond in a human voice.

CEO of Dominos responds by video:

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