Week 7: Misuse of Social Technology

Social media is great for connecting with customers, but what happens when something goes wrong? HMV experienced many business' worst nightmare during a particularly difficult time for the company.

The Incident

HMV is an entertainment retailer primarily based in the UK, selling movies, music, games and electronics. In January 2013, the business went into administration, causing the company to fire employees to reduce costs. On the 31^st of January, Poppy Rose, the (ex) HMV community manager, who ran the business’ Twitter and Facebook, live tweeted the firing of herself and 59 other employees from HMV’s head office on their official account, using the hashtag ‘#hmvXFactorFiring’, which quickly began trending. In her tweets, which later continued on her personal account, she expressed her dislike of how the company was being run and her frustrations with her employers for refusing to learn about the importance of social media.

From The Guardian and Poppy Rose’s Twitter

Later, the new administrator of the account deleted the offending tweets, and posted a response, shown below.

Our @hmvtweets picked up a lot of attention today, it’s clearly been a tough day for us all at hmv, please stick with us #hmvxfactorfiring

There have been job losses today, but not in our stores. We are still open for business, thx for your continued support #savehmv

One of our departing colleagues was understandably upset. We’re still here thou, thx for supporting hmv thro these challenging times

The Fallout

These tweets were clearly not good for the business, showing just how bad the situation within the company was at the time, as well as highlighting Ms Rose’s point of how very few within the company had a good understanding of social media. It also gained HMV some very bad press, mocked the company for the incident, which could have been easily avoided. However, the issue wasn’t without a silver lining for HMV, with their Twitter gaining around 12,000 followers.

The Future

This sort of embarrassment could be easily avoided in the future, both by HMV again or any other company. Once Ms Rose had handed over the account details (which had happened earlier that day), and had set up the new administrator, the company should have immediately changed the passwords and removed her from admin, clearly neither of which they did. They were also very slow in their response to the situation, with it taking around 20 minutes for the tweets to be removed and the response to be posted, by which time it had already gone viral. If this incident were to somehow happen again to any company, their social media team should be quick to respond and begin to rebuild its image.

What other embarrassing corporate social media screw ups do you know about? Tell me in the comments, I’d love to hear about it!