Bad Tweets Get Yet Another PR Firm Fired

by Jason Keath on Jun 16, 2011 Follow @jasonkeath

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Twitter is this weird ecosystem where photos of what we ate for lunch and prideful boasts about our kids playing in the backyard sit right next to the latest Justin Bieber video and, oh yeah, the promotions we send out for our business and clients.

With the personal communication style of Twitter, it is easy to relate to sending out the occasional dumb tweet from a business account.

Unless of course you are the client or employer of that person and that tweet just cost you money.

The latest in the unending “bad Twitter decisions” trend, is from the PR firm The Redner Group who is representing the long awaited launch of the video game Duke Nukem Forever. After getting a ton of bad reviews, The Redner Group decided to send out the below tweet, threatening to blacklist all the publishers who “went too far with their reviews.”

Redner was savvy enough to hashtag the bad Tweet. I guess to make sure the Tweet got out there to as many people as possible. The Tweet was deleted 40 minutes after it was published. And since then, Redner has posted several apology Tweets, ensuring their followers understand that they were at fault and not the client.

It goes without saying, The Redner Group is no longer representing Duke Nukem Forever.

There are plenty of safeguards and simple training that could have helped here. We are building lots of this type of training into our Social Fresh Academy. Because these really are easy mistakes to make. AND easy to prevent.

What did Redner do wrong? How Could they have prevented this PR snafu?

Please include your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennylane78

When representing a company or product with that large of a following (or any, in that case) allowing emotion to get in the way can only generate backlash. Their job is to educate and promote to the public, not give their opinions.
http://flavors.me/amydanielle Amy

Redner went wrong by publicly announcing that they are going to control/stop the “conversation” in the future. Bad video game reviews are a part of that industry and it’s terrible to boast about sending games to those who are more likely to give it a positive one. They should flood the web with as many good reviews as they can and boost those search results but never try to stop or change bad reviews. Bad press happens and there is nothing you can do about it except respond to the best of your abilities. They could have prevented this snafu by hiring a community manager who knows how to sway negativity rather than stop it from happening because they’re afraid. And if you ARE going to go down that path of conversation communism, don’t tweet about it. Der!
http://www.tommartin.typepad.com Tom Martin

How to keep this from happening? That’s pretty simple… have a brain about you. Twitter defaults to public. To post those thoughts publicly makes zero sense. Sometimes it’s as simple as inhaling. Then making decisions.

@TomMartin:twitter
http://viktorsblog.com/ Viktor Nagornyy

You really do have to use your common sense, which clearly is missing in this situation. If there are a lot of negative reviews of a product, well that means your product sucks. It’s not the reviewer’s fault, should’ve been a better product.
http://twitter.com/Marymoose16 Mary McElwee

While I’m sure that they FELT that way, you have to think twice or more before you post a negative comment. I wonder whether the game company asked them to tweet that as the emotion is pretty heavy for someone (the PR firm) who is one step removed from the product.
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