The competition for biggest social media goof ups is tougher than you’d expect! At this point, picking the most successful campaigns would have been easier than picking out the worst failures. Who’d have known there would be so many gems of social media gaffes, right?
Not that we are complaining. We sure had fun looking at them. We have compiled a list of six of our most favorite gaffes from 2012-2013.
Tesco’s hitting the hay
This has got to be the most unfortunate yet hilarious gaffes from all of 2012-2013. You’d think the second largest retailer in the world would know better than to make fun of their biggest scandal in history.
Photo credit – futurecomms.co.uk
The horse meat scandal of early 2013 hit Tesco the hardest with everybody slinging mud at and publicly shaming the company. And then came a tweet by the company’s customer care unit, signing off for the day with the extremely poorly chosen phrase “hit the hay”. And even through Tesco apologized promptly the responses to the tweet were crazy…and hilarious.
HMV group’s disgruntled community manager
HMV sure was in a hurry to do away with its employees and so when the group fired the community manager, it forgot to get the Twitter log in details first. Read on to find out how much a bitter ex employee can damage your reputation.
Photo credit – Marketing Week
CNN’s ‘quickly jumping to conclusions’ act
Since we are talking about companies firing people too soon (without getting their account information first) how can we not talk about CNN’s breaking news gaffe of 2012? Executives down at CNN probably got confused about all the hoopla around President Obama’s health care laws and the Supreme Court’s verdict.
Walmart’s furious status updates on Facebook
If Tesco, the second biggest retailer made the list, you didn’t think Walmart, which is one step ahead of Tesco as the world’s biggest retailer would stay behind, did you?
The furious community manager for Walmart accidentally posted from the wrong account. The extremely angry post was only visible for five hours but you know how quickly word gets around here don’t you? The post was written in all capitals – you can image how angry the poor manager must have been!
Photo credit – Nick Cicero
The Onion’s use of the blurred C word
We are still not sure what were they thinking! The Onion is known for poking fun at daily events and news making stories. And they do create controversy almost on a routine basis. But what happened during the last Oscars was neither satirical nor fun.
The Onion edgily tweeted about Quvenzhane Wallis, a nine year old actress who created quite the stir. The tweet garnered so many negative comments and heavy backlashes that the usually “we-are-not-going-to-apologize-about-it” company had to well, apologize about it. CEO Steve Hannah came up with a personal apology, new reformations to their Twitter and social media guidelines and a promise to take strict action against the concerned individual.
