Everybody Needs to Take a Beat

Image by City of San Antonio

by Kim Niemi

Sporting events get people excited—especially major sporting events that only happen periodically, or against longtime rivals, like the World Series, or the Olympics, or the World Cup. Businesses get excited too, because with the right marketing in place, they can leverage all that excitement into added attention on their company. Unless they post something stupid in their haste to be part of the mix. 

​It’s far too easy to post something that can be misconstrued and cause offense – if it weren’t, people would stop this doing it. Take these examples of from this year’s World Cup:

Delta Airlines

There are no giraffes in Ghana. Doh!

Samsung Mobile

Donovan wasn't included on this year's team. Oops!

And Royal Dutch Airlines (known as KLM)

Stereotypes never go over well.

The KLM tweet included a cartoon image of a man wearing a poncho and sombrero; not surprisingly, many found it offensive. Yikes.

What do the three tweets above have in common (aside from a surge of angry reply tweets)? They are all examples of social sabotage. 

In each case, a pause to fact-check, or to consider the ramifications of narrowing an entire country down to a cartoon stereotype, could have made all the difference.  

Because the consequences of social sabotage are very real. As one Twitter user playfully pointed out:  

But it’s really not funny. At least, it’s not if you’re “Steve.”

With each example above, the companies responsible were quick to remove the tweets in response to the resulting backlash, but not before they were all screen-capped for posterity. This is why it’s so important not to err in the first place – because damage control is a mythical beast on the Internet.

To help you avoid your own social missteps, here’s a refresher of ourrules, plus a new one inspired by these latest tweets:

• Rule 1: There is no privacy on the Internet. 
  
• Rule 2: The Internet is forever.
  
• Rule 3: Take a beat before posting. Be sure you've got your facts straight, and there's nothing controversial in your post, before hitting enter. 
  

Seriously. You just might save your job.

 Have your own story about social sabotage to share? Comment below. To read more instances of social sabotage, click here.