It doesn’t matter if you’re a big brand, a small brand, representing yourself, or representing a company. Social media is a veritable graveyard for those who’ve dug themselves under with these embarrassing social media fails.
Warning: you may forever be afraid to click “post” after reading this list of cringe-worthy social media slip-ups.
iPhones are better than BlackBerry right?
As far as fails go, this one is pretty embarrassing. At the very beginning of 2015 (can you think back that far?), BlackBerry sent out slick picture through their Twitter account. And get this: they sent the tweet out using an iPhone. You can see in the tweets timestamp the device it was sent from.
It’s not a crisis-level fail, but it’s a pretty funny slip up.
And though it was deleted quickly, we all know that things posted on the Internet never die. It was screen grabbed by several savvy followers and reposted like crazy in the weeks that followed.
Tinder pops a blood vessel
In August, Vanity Fair magazine called out Tinder for being part of the “dating apocalypse”. Apparently forgetting that “all press is good press”, Tinder took to twitter is a series of posts escalating both in their hilarity and cringe-worthiness.
Ending the conversation with the ridiculous tweet, “Talk to our many users in China and North Korea who want to find a way to meet people on Tinder even though Facebook is banned,” they took the tweets down by the next day. But, once again, the damage had already been done.
Chalk this one up to a social media manager who’d had two many cups of coffee. As for the rest of us, this is an excellent reminder to take ten deep breaths before rebutting anything on social media.
Seaworld goes to the fishes:
Now, you might remember a little documentary called “Blackfish” that took the world by storm in 2013 and left viewers with a sour taste in their mouth when it came to whales in captivity.
In an attempt to provide customers with more transparency, Seaworld started the hashtag #AskSeaworld.
It’s a hot button issue, and Twitter users pretty much immediately hijacked the hashtag with questions like, “As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, Seaworld responded to the maelstrom of hijacked hashtage with the snarky response, “Jacking hashtags is so 2014. ”
Way to make a bad situation worse Seaworld. Belittling the intelligent points made, instead of addressing them, is a surefire way to look like the guilty party in the room.
Long story short, if you release a hashtag into the Twitter-verse, be prepared for all possibilities. After all, it’s a conversation not a dissertation.
American Apparel gets it way wrong
On the 4th of July, AA posted a picture of some smoke on a red background to their Tumblr account. NBD right?
Wrong. So wrong.
While the image was eye-catching and beautiful, the context was horrific, and traumatized their followers. It was a picture of the aftermath of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. A disaster that had killed 7 people.
A good reminder to always reverse Google search any images we are thinking of using.
Taxi hashtag hailed as HUGE mistake
A taxi company started the hashtag “#YourTaxis” in an effort to generate user feedback and reviews. Instead, it became a minefield of stories detailing incidents of violence and sexual assault against users.
This photo tells the story best:
IHOP is a raging sexist
In what is probably one of the strangest and most misguided social media campaigns, IHOP posted a series of extremely offensive posts comparing their pancakes to boobs, using one-liners you’d expect to hear in a grade nine boys locker room. No thank you IHOP.
Politician tweets “ISIS isn’t neccesarily evil”
…and then ends his campaign for the Minnesota House. Shortest story ever.
Australian store bags on the homeless (and others)
Far across the pond, there exists a bohemian little café called “Lentil As Anything” that touts a “pay as you like” policy. Cute right?
The shop next to them didn’t think so, and posted this:
The post received mass amounts of negative responses, and even resulted in the shop’s property getting vandalized.
The lesson? Social media is probably not the best medium for complaining about your neighbours. Especially if you’re planning on lumping vegans in with drug addicts.
The Queen is Dead. Oh wait, scratch that!
A BBC reporter posted on Twitter that Queen Elizabeth has passed away. Turns out, not one shred of truth in that. Wow – that’s one crazy fact she forgot to check.
Dear Seahawks, playing a football game is not like overcoming discrimination
When the Seattle Seahawks compared winning a football game to a quote for Martin Luther Kind Jr, “Faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just to see the first step,” they may have missed the mark.
We’re not saying that winning a football game isn’t hard work; it’s just that it’s not overcoming decades of racial hatred and oppression hard.
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