Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

17 of the most offensive and dumb Twitter, Facebook and Instagram fails

The Bankers Who Think ISIS Killings Are a Hoot

Just last week, six HSBC bankers in Birmingham, England, were fired over re-enacting (and recording, and posting on Instagram) a mock ISIS beheading. One of the bank employees – the one who nabbed the coveted leading role of beheading victim – rocked an orange jumpsuit as he kneeled in front of his five colleagues, who did a lovely job as a supporting ensemble in black tracksuits and balaclavas.

They were fired after the super-insensitive clip circulated online, of course. In their defense, the video was reportedly made during a work-sponsored team-building exercise, and you can only do so many trust falls before it becomes boring and, quite frankly, dangerous....

Last week, Coca-Cola suspended its Super Bowl-timed, automated social campaign #MakeItHappy, when Gawker tricked the brand into tweeting out a number of lines from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In the campaign, Coke asked people to respond to negative tweets with positive ones — using an ASCII code to convert their tweets into images like singing cats and sunglass-wearing palm trees.

But while the soda giant may have been left as red-faced as its signature cans after this debacle, it’s not the first time the use of automated replies on Twitter has backfired on a brand.

Here’s a look at some of the biggest recent brand fails in automation on Twitter...

People oversharing on social media is often unexciting and common, but taking to Twitter to narrate personal events while they're happening seems to be the real-life version of a soap opera. We used to tune in for the latest episode, now we anxiously wait for the next tweet!

Starting with The Woman Who Live-Tweeted About a Crash Only to Learn It Killed Her Husband

JPMorgan shouldn’t have announced its Twitter Q&A unless it was prepared to contend with the public’s negative view of it and other banks.

... JPMorgan’s bankers are getting used to business deals with young men who communicate in emojis and text-message abbreviations. (“During the Facebook roadshow,” according to Bloomberg, “Lee dropped his usual pinstripes for a Mark Zuckerberg-like black sweatshirt with his name on the back.”) Yet, when the bank devised the promotional Q&A, it may not have fully grasped the extent to which new media has transformed how people share information, and how this has tipped existing structures of power.

This is Twitter’s very purpose: to allow any individual to share the same space with, for instance, a hugely powerful bank. With this space comes attention and authority. Unlike at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, there are no security guards keeping undesirable elements out of Twitter. If JPMorgan executives expected that #AskJPM would attract only future job applicants—the kind who would don snappy new suits and genuflect nervously—they must have been stunned at the reckoning....

Cheerios recently tried to make the most of social media as a PR tool by doing what everyone else was already doing: designing Facebook apps to encourage its hundreds of thousands of fans to interact with the brand.

Unfortunately, that plan blew up in the face of parent company General Mills. Cheerios attempted to gain the invisible, invaluable thing we call “brand loyalty” by presenting fans with an app that allowed them to write about “what Cheerios means to me” in the cereal’s trademark font. But the brand’s social team quickly discovered that many Facebook users don’t approve of General Mills’s relationship with genetically modified foods—or its political advocacy on the subject.

The activists’ quick storming of the forum forced Cheerios to kill the app after just one day. Click through for the backstory....

[How to fail at social media, damage your brand and create bad PR]

It can't all be perfect: the worst of content marketing in 2014 stuck to old frameworks at best, and furthered harmful stereotypes or outright offended at worst. It was a particularly rough year for some pretty major brands, especially on the social media front.

Luckily, their snafus can teach us all a little something about what to do better next year. So, as you're reading through our list of the worst of 2014, make some mental notes on what 2015 will look like.Without further ado....

Here’s another one for the bulging “Kids Are Dumb” file: it seems a Florida teenager has cost her father an $80,000 legal settlement with a single, profoundly ill-advised Facebook post.
 
Patrick Snay, 69, had served as headmaster at a Miami private school called Gulliver Preparatory School until 2010, when his contract wasn’t renewed. Snay sued Gulliver for age discrimination, and in November 2011, the school settled out of court with an agreement to pay Snay $80,000 in damages, $10,000 in back pay, and $60,000 in legal fees. As is often the case, one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality, with Snay and his wife promising not to tell anyone about the existence or terms of the deal.
 
However Snay did tell his daughter Dana, a former student at the school, who now boasted to her 1,200 closest friends on Facebook: “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Gulliver alumni saw the posts and alerted the school’s lawyers, who promptly informed Snay senior the deal was off. He had obviously violated the confidentiality clause....