In the contemporary world social media play a very important role in the brand promotion. They can serve as excellent means for advertising and awareness raising. At the same time, social networks are powerful enough to destroy brands’ reputations and endanger their images. Since all of the contemporary powerful and famous brands are employing social networks, this risk is relevant to every one of them. One mistake can lead to a chain reaction and very serious negative consequences such as loss of clients, popularity and revenues. This paper discusses a situation that happened with Kitchen Aid when their company Twitter account was jeopardized by an inappropriate post.
Not so long ago, Kitchen Aid found itself in the middle of a rather serious social network crisis which happened due to an accident on the company’s official Twitter account. The situation occurred unexpectedly. Someone from the Kitchen Aid staff posted a message about President Obama’s grandmother and her death days before Obama became President. The post was rather insensitive. Even though the message was deleted very soon after being placed, a lot of people noticed it and immediately reacted. This created a typical social media crisis when a mistake causes ripple effect and results in an endangerment of the brand reputation.
The company authorities chose to handle the accident with honesty. The leaders of Kitched Aid admitted that it was a big mistake that a staff member was able to post such message on behalf of the company on its official account. This created an illusion that the whole company shared the way of thinking of the author of the post. Cynthia Soledad, the head of the company’s brand immediately apologized to President Obama. Besides, she emphasized that the author of the insensitive message would no longer be allowed to post on behalf of Kitchen Aid.
In my opinion, the social media crisis in this situation was handled in the best way possible. The main benefits of this approach were the speed with which the company’s authorities reacted to the crisis, and the honesty they demonstrated. Kitchen Aid leaders quickly noticed and deleted the inappropriate message endangering their brand reputation which minimized the number of Twitter users who noticed the post. They also immediately directed their apologies to President Obama and accepted the fact that they made a mistake.
The situation could have been avoided. The main cause of this crisis was the confusion of personal and company Twitter accounts. A post like that would still be insensitive if it was posted on an individual channel, but placing it on the company page was wrong because it created bad reputation for the whole brand and everyone related to it. This is why every organization using social media should make sure that personal accounts of staff members are not confused with the official page.
In my opinion PR managers are responsible for social media crises. PR managers promote brands and build their reputation, and this is done by means of creating social network accounts and interacting with the public. This is why PR managers are to monitor the messages the brands communicate to the public and image that it creates for the businesses. It is their duty to follow that the brand is only associated with positive notions and concepts, and all the negative factors are quickly eliminated.