Sometimes with social media things go a bit wrong. Something happens that is unplanned and leaves you with egg on your face. So, you're in a hole. How do you get yourself out of it? Honesty and humour, it seems.
The Mission: promote the grand work of Charnwood Borough Council’s CCTV service.
The Tactic: tweet live from the camera control centre on a busy Saturday night in Loughborough.
The Result: “Ooops. Charnwood Borough Council's apology after Twitter porn cock-up.”
How the hell did that happen?
The answer is a horrible hashtag howler “#AfterDark” which, as it transpires, is a Twitter portal into a shadowy world of depravity and pornography.
Believe it or not, we did a quick check before we set our minds on using it and didn’t spot anything inappropriate. Obviously, we should have been more thorough. Hashtag hindsight. What a wonderful thing eh?
We only realised the true horror of our boob – pardon the pun - when a Twitter follower pointed out that he’d followed the hashtag into the seedy underbelly of social media.
My inner journalist and my more measured comms brain simultaneously cried out and then darted into crisis mode.
We’d promoted the hashtag on our own Twitter account and in a press release so had no choice but to amend both which would obviously tip off anyone who was paying attention that something had gone awry.
A recovery plan was very swiftly hatched and activated. We:
- apologised to our Twitter follower for any offence we may have caused. He was “#happy” with our response
- changed the hashtag to #LboroAfterDark (after doing a thorough check!)
- amended the press release we’d circulated to media to promote the Twitter event
- decided, as no one had been hurt or been seriously offended, to poke fun at ourselves and made it clear that we’d learned a valuable social media lesson
- prepared a self-deprecating media statement which opened with the line: “This was clearly an unintentional boob!”
- took the decision to get involved in any conversations about our blunder on social media to show that we were taking our well earned punishment on the chin
- alerted our relevant councillors, senior managers and the Chief Executive who were extraordinarily relaxed about it!
The following morning, our worst nightmare became a reality as an old-school Leicester Mercury hack asked us for a comment on our blunder.
Before sending our statement, I gave him a call and explained the sorry saga and how even we chuckled at the inevitable stick we’d get.
Did our recovery plan work? Well, the Mercury ran with an unsurprising page 3 lead.
Two local radio stations and the local weekly paper asked for our statement and had a little chuckle at our expense while we got involved in about a dozen Twitter conversations.
We also had some lovely comments from some corners of the Twittersphere, with one user posting: “Lovely response from @CharnwoodBC on #hashtag story, handling issue with warmth & humility. Case study in social media management too!”
Another said: “@CharnwoodBC - we all make mistakes! Well done for dealing with your # issue so quickly & professionally!”
Interestingly, the hack who originally chortled at our misery turned out to be one of our biggest supporters, responding to one critical reader on Twitter: “Fair play to them (Charnwood). They're having a giggle at their own expense.”
What surprised me the most was the majority of stick we received was from our “tut tutting” peers in the comms industry!
Confucius once said: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Well we’re back on our feet, we’ve cleaned our self-inflicted wounds and we now have a bit more wisdom on using hashtags … or banning them. Not sure yet!
Oh, and one more thing – our CCTV Twitter event received some excellent media exposure and we picked up more than a dozen new followers on the night!
Maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Mike Underwood is communications officer at Charnwood Borough Council
Pic via Flickr creative commons
