Chrysler’s social media road rage
By Carman Pirie: Mar 14, 2011
Much has been said about Chrysler’s firing of their social media agency this week after a road rage faux pas by a junior agency staffer. Beyond questions of whether the firing was justified, as organizations build out their social media marketing efforts this story points to a recurring challenge for marketers:
In a world that favors speed (which often comes with increased errors) and, supposedly, authenticity, what happens when someone authentically makes a mistake while being authentic?
The frosted mini-wheat side of me would like to believe that we’ll somehow reach a place where people will understand that there’s a human on the other end of a twitter account, and that said human can indeed be angry at fellow motorists while making a foolish mistake at work all at the same time. Welcome to 2011, etc. However, the wholesome wheatiness side of me finds that rather naive.
What do you think? Will we be seeing such mis-tweets and the like increasingly named as the reason an agency or employment relationship turns sour, or will we grow more tolerant of them?
March 14, 2011
10:12 am
Tact will be the next big marketing skill. Some people (eg. Sarah Silverman) will get away with all kinds of attention-getting quotes that otherwise would be seen as humorless in the wrong company. Others (Michael Richards) won’t.
Being the first to admit your mistakes, accepting consequences for your actions and so on will still matter. In my view, New Media Strategies comes out looking better than Chrystler here. NMS took their licks with grace and apologized, accepting the consequences. Chrystler appears disingenuous and risk-averse instead – focusing more on some picture-perfect Disney image than the actual brand they are promoting. I wonder what Eminem would say about this? Or anyone else in Detroit who’s ever bought a truck? Seems to me that the occassional F-bomb might fit right into the hard-working Detroit image.
March 14, 2011
10:13 am
Also, the “Account was compromised” B.S. is just plain dumb. http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/03/chrysler-drops-f-bomb-via-twitter-employee-fired.html
March 14, 2011
2:59 pm
Appreciate the comment Ryan. Tact would be lovely… in the interim, I might settle for “brands” (of course, always better to talk about companies / groups of people in the abstract, right?) just taking themselves a tad less seriously.
March 17, 2011
10:32 pm
I would hope people will become slightly more tolerant, but I expect it will continue to be an issue.
I think the danger of the faux pas extends to another aspect of social media and marketing, which is the fact that personal and professional worlds–and online accounts–are blending together, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. I had originally started my twitter account to be pseudo-anonymous (and I still don’t have my last name there), but after following acquaintances, I found myself added to a bunch of twitter Lists that make it semi-obvious who my employer is, and I can’t really prevent this from occurring. Am I now in a situation where anything controversial I post on twitter, which would have simply been innocent internet jackassery otherwise, reflects negatively on my employer?
Another side of the same coin is the way many companies are now endorsing/featuring pesudo-personal accounts of staffers – you folks have your accounts featured on the Kula homepage. So, for example, let’s say Jeff goes too far criticizing the mayor in the current Black Eyed Peas concert kerfuffle, does that put Kula at risk of losing some work from the HRM? It doesn’t reflect the Kula viewpoint in the least, but the @brightwhite account has been tied to the company more explicitly than if someone had gone to the trouble of looking Jeff up. It’s not really “what Jeff White, who happens to work at Kula, said on his personal account”, it’s “what Jeff White from Kula said”.
Maybe that’s not the best example, but I just mean a lot of accounts have become a central point of contact for an individual both personally and professionally, and that further complicates matters.
March 18, 2011
12:28 pm
I think you’re really getting to the meat of the issue Grant.
Isn’t social media really just exposing the messiness that has always been there? Professional and personal worlds have always co-existed. The idea of the professional and the personal as two separate and distinct parts of one self is really quite bizarre when you think of it… it just never really seems to happen like that in real life. We bring what’s supposedly “personal” into our work / professional situations every day. We take the “professional” home with us. As much as the 20th century tried to force the separation, we humans seem to have a way of being more complex than that.
Interestingly, throughout most of human history, we haven’t tried to be nearly as compartmentalized about it all. In the bigger picture, the 20th century division between the personal and the professional appears as a rather odd blip on the radar.
Your example is certainly apt. Jeff and I are both opinionated and we’re not inclined to censor ourselves much on twitter or elsewhere. In general, I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde… “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” — and with that, if I’m being honest, I probably intentionally try to find the odd line or two to cross on twitter.
Have we gone too far on occasion? Maybe. But, I’ve worked with a lot of people and served a lot of clients with whom I’ve disagreed politically and otherwise… and it works when both sides are mature enough recognize that’s okay. So far, our approach has been that if someone doesn’t want to work with us because they disagree with something we said on Twitter, then that’s likely a good indication that they’re not the type of person we want to spend our time with anyway.
Maybe it’s not the right approach, but it’s the one we’ve chosen. And I’ve gotta say… I just hate it when social media douchebags preach authenticity and transparency just to turn around and pretend that they’re all smiles all the time and that kumbaya is the only song on their iPod playing on a loop 24×7.
Thanks for the comment Grant – much appreciated.
March 22, 2011
8:38 am
Interestingly enough initially I fell on “It’s human to err” side of the debate. After further thought it began to irk me that an agency who was in control of a multi-billion company’s social media communication made such an amateur mistake.
If this had been a more sensitive client, let’s say “World Vision” would people have felt differently in their responses either way?
The other side of this debate is when you’re handling communication for another company you need to separate it from your personal communication so these errors don’t occur. In this case simply use a different application for personal use and another for clients (Tweetdeck for personal and Hootesuite for business?)
Great post as usual Carmen.
Cheers!
March 22, 2011
4:49 pm
Thanks Bill. You’re quite right… from a professional conduct POV, the error just shows plain sloppiness.