Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.

No one is perfect and you can't expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media's good side....

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....