Is social media a reputation management risk?

Recently, I walked into my director’s office to show him how to add the Twitter handle for our business onto his Twitter application within his iPhone. Before I left, reiterated how easy it is to mistakenly post tweets on the wrong Twitter handle due to the easy ability to switch between a personal and business Twitter handle. I knew it could be disastrous, but he is the boss right. Two weeks later, our business’s Twitter handle posts a strongly backed Republican political tweet supporting the government shut down. Uh-oh!  This business has about 2100 Twitter followers. Luckily, the Twitter handle is monitored pretty regularly and the posts were deleted within ten minutes of publishing.

How do we handle this PR nightmare? Was it deleted fast enough that no one saw it? The next morning a team meeting was held to discuss all of these questions. Ultimately, the company decided to post a Tweet saying an employee had accidentally tweeted on the wrong profile and the company has taken necessary steps to ensure it will not happen again.

In this instance, the company was lucky because not one follower picked up on the message. The company was safe from positioning themselves in an inappropriate political manner.

This is not always the case. Red Cross and Chrysler both have experience with tweets that were published accidentally with inappropriate content. Click below to read about these business' experience.

http://mashable.com/2011/03/09/chrysler-drops-the-f-bomb-on-twitter/