I think this is one of those cases where some humour might have been helpful. This is the kind of mistake anyone could have made and it had little to do with peoples car buying decisions. The Red Cross nailed it in their response to their “drunk tweet” incident… Chrysler looks like the politician who gets angry when a pie is thrown in their face; shake your head, smile and laugh it off. Unlike the other well-known incident like this – featuring a FedEx vendor that dissed Atlanta on a trip to visit his client this tweet had little to no substantive effect on the overal objective of the @ChryslerAutos account – which is presumably to sell cars. Anyone not going to buy a Chevy beacuse someone who works at a vendor for the car company might not like drivers in that companies hometown? Um… no I didn’t think so, unless I suppose you live in Detroit.

What say you readers? Chime in. Am I wrong, was firing the best way to go here?

Firing is rarely the solution to any problem. In fact Chrysler could have played this to their advantage and made fun of things. Instead they come across as heavy handed and nasty.

Cheers
Mark Levison

I am not sure firing was the right move–however, the tweet did cause the agency to lose the account, which is pretty severe and probably a blow to the agency’s revenue.

I do see this case as very different from the Red Cross… and while I can entirely sympathize with tweeting from the wrong account (at one time I was managing 4 accounts–it’s happened to me *more* than once!) what the real mistake is that tweet was entirely inappropriate coming from someone who works on the Chrysler account–even if it was from his personal account.

If you read one of the in-depth stories, it talks about how Chrysler has a huge ad campaign around Detroit and “Motor City” and working at an agency it’s inappropriate to say anything seemingly insulting about your client (i.e. the FedEx tweet) no matter how cryptic.

As for Chrysler dumping the agency–I’d bet that relationship was in trouble long before the rogue tweet…

Love the context Kelly provided with mentioning the pro-Detroit ad campaign. Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc

And, wise words on the trouble being there before this incident. If the relationship was stronger – it could have survived.

Interesting few best-practice suggestions:

1) Use separate accounts on separate systems (ie: Hootsuite for work, Twitter Web for home/personal use)

2) When in doubt, don’t.

3) Have a plan for dealing with potential mistakes/errors being made with status updates, posts or tweets

I thought this was an interesting story and while I’m pretty set against outsourcing social media, in this case it was good because Chrysler could point the finger at the vendor, get rid of them and then move on. Maybe that’s a good argument to outsource…

Do we know that this was a mistake in the sense that the person was trying to post to their personal account and did it from Chrysler instead?

If so, I feel badly for this person as I have done the ‘ole accidental post before but lucky for me, I’m not managing twitter accounts for large brands… so in this case, I’d say that you shouldn’t link your personal account and that of a large brand like this. It’s so much worse then there are lots of people watching.

I think Chrysler kinda had to choice but to lower the boom, it had an f-bomb in it, it had to do with Detroit and I think it was a snarky comment to begin with. They aren’t really a “fun” brand so there was no way they were going to slip gracefully on the banana peel.

I am not surprised this resulted in a firing at all. A harsh tweet, and it reflected badly on New Media Strategies. I have no data on this, but I’ll bet issues with employers and employees over Facebook and Twitter comments are more common than most think. Every once in awhile we get to see one of these stories sensationalized (that Red Cross story was fantastic).

[...] Update: two similar situations (and their resolutions) have been previously covered on the blog. Tim Hortons and Chrysler. [...]