What Brands Can Learn From a Congressman's PR Disaster

It?s dubbed the ?Battle of the Bulge,? and it?s the biggest PR disaster I?ve ever seen on Twitter.

I have to be careful how I write about this that Google doesn?t mark me as having adult content (already been through that, took a few years to recover). Simply put, a suggestive photo was tweeted from Mr. Weiner?s Twitter account to a young woman. Weiner is used to jokes because of his last name. Now we all get in on it. Thank you for the laughs Congressman Weiner. But the longer this goes on without a better resolution, it?s making me squirm instead of laugh.

The guy is also very comfortable in the spotlight and usually loves media coverage but it?s not the same when you?re in trouble. He?s dodging questions, looking shifty, and it?s becoming pathetic.? Now if we could counterbalance his theatrics with House Speaker John Boehner who cries all the time, you?d keep us all entertained forever.

This scandal is instructive for any brand (people are brands too) in social media. There are risks to stepping into the public eye and there are risks to staying out of it.

Shelly Palmer covered the story brilliantly from a social media PR perspective. One challenge of Twitter is it?s a medium most of us aren?t used to. Before Twitter we weren?t all able to broadcast information so quickly to so many, so easily.

?Twitter allows us to engage in two relatively new forms of communication: many-to-one and many-to-many. I say relatively new because the tools have only been available for a little over five years. It is important to note that, unlike one-to-one (conversation) or one-to-many (broadcasting) which humans are physiologically equipped to monitor, many-to-one (tweets) and many-to-many (retweets) require digital tools to monitor. Not to put too fine a point on it, human beings have been doing one-to-one communication for over 140,000 years, and have been doing formalized one-to-many communication since the invention of the Greek Proscenium (about 3,500 years).?

Twitter Lacks Security
Twitter has a flaw ? they seem to ignore that more than one person might be tweeting from an account. The only way you can accommodate that is to give out your account username and passoword. This drives me crazy. I wish Twitter would make it easier for people (not just one person) to manage their brands. Facebook does. Twitter could add a dropdown of all your accounts to choose from (like Facebook), or let you check which accounts you want the tweet to go out on (like Hootsuite).

The way Twitter works, it?s easy to see how your password could get out. Someone could tweet from your account and could get you in trouble fast. Every tweet is saved and stamped with a time, date and sometimes even your location. As Shelley points out: ?There is absolutely nothing private about Twitter. Nothing.? Twitter doesn?t just pose problems for individuals, it can interfere with the security of nations ? like when Bin Laden?s neighbor accidentally live tweeted the US operation to kill Bin Laden.

It?s very likely that as he claims, someone breached his Twitter account to send the tweet without his permission. The picture is so generic it really could be just about any man?s and if I were him, that?s what I?d say. The picture was not of me. I didn?t send it. End of story. But his cagey responses make him look guilty. We?re all waiting for the rest of the story.

Sometimes I want an option to hold all tweets in queue so you could make sure you meant to send something before it goes live. I have wished I could retract a tweet (have you?). But that would also take away from the immediacy of Twitter.

People Forget Fast, Come Clean and Move On
What now? Ask any social media expert and they?d say being transparent is the best solution. It?s time to come clean on the whole story. It couldn?t possibly be more embarrassing than it already is. People know other people, even famous people, do dumb things. They usually forgive you.

The longer he waits to give the full story, the worse he looks.

It?s time to bare all Rep. W!

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Source: http://www.newspapergrl.com/what-brands-can-learn-from-a-congressmans-pr-disaster/

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