Hot on the heels of Weinergate comes the latest high-profile Twitter misstep proving the adage that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The victim this time is PR agency Redner Group who yesterday lost its largest client when principal James Redner knee-jerked a tweet from the hip after encountering some unfavorable reviews of client 2K’s “Duke Nukem Forever”:
It seems that even people who deal in the media for a living still don’t understand that the Internet is forever. Redner tried deleting the tweet, but unsurprisngly, it was too late.
Ars Technica’s gaming editor Ben Kuchera (who first reported the story) captured a screengrab of the tweetand a follow on tweet reading: “Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews … that’s completely different.”
Wired and AdAge quickly picked up the story, and before you knew it, the backpedaling Redner had dug a whole for his agency that no amount of apologizing would fill. AdAge reported that Redner tried apologizing on Twitter at first, and then began reaching out to media individually to apologize, but in some cases this only served to inform them about the error in the first place. Before the day was out, 2K issued a statement telling the media that the Redner Group would no longer be representing them.
If your company doesn’t have a system in place to QA posts prior to submission, perhaps now would be a good time to set that up.