Sure social media still remains a bawling toddler of an industry–no one’s quite masterminded the ROI aspect of it, but everyone’s tacitly agreed that there’s something very valuable in a medium that allows you to connect with consumers directly. Still, it remains curious–especially in the wake of Chrysler’s Twitter debacle–we’re never going to let you live that one down, guys–that other widely-recognized brands continue to fail. Even though the solutions are pretty apparent, here are five universally-recognized brands who willfully continue to misuse social media. Or fail to understand its profound reach.
- Wendy’s. What consumers love about social media is the same thing that corporations who don’t play by the rules hate about it: Accountability. Fast food chains are known for their ability to scale quickly and in a pre-social era, there was far less accountability for workplace conditions. That initially changed with the now-infamous Dominos YouTube scandal. A new video making the rounds via YouTube exposes filthy working conditions at a Wendy’s store and unfortunately for them, this is something they can’t pin on an employee; the one responsible for the video was fired for trying to bring the health hazards to managers’ attentions. This isn’t so much as a social media screw-up as it a brand who remains unaware that a simple video like this can cause indelible damage to a fast food restaurant’s brand.
- Courtney Love. Love is notorious for her Twitter antics. Most recently, she alleged that one of her lawyers had been bought off…and was promptly sued for defamation. Love will be paying $430,000 to settle the suit, but so long as her access to the microblogging platform is unsupervised, how many more defamation suits can she afford to pay off?
- Secret Service. Believe it or not, even the American government has a brand they work hard to develop, maintain, and protect. So when the Secret Service Twitter account posted this tweet about Fox news, it accidentally put a dent in their credibility.