From the "You couldn't make this up if you tried" pile Vodafone have had to issue multiple apologies after what appears to be a rogue employee tweeted out the following on Vodafone's Twitter account.
"is fed up with dirty homo's and is going after beaver"
This is a massive backfire for Vodafone on just about every level you could imagine, they tweeted the following apology:
"A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally" "We're very sorry"
It remains to be seen what further fall out there may be from this, here are my theories on what exactly happend:
- Staff member decided to come up with a creative way to hand in his or her notice (Possible)
- Staff member was running the vodafone account and their personal account from one client and misstweeted doh! (Very Likely)
- Vodafone are trying a whole new approach to viral marketing (Not likely)
Much respect as always to my friends at The Register for getting the scoop on this one and a screen shot.
I have just taken a look through the @VodafoneUK account what's interesting is up until the time when the message was posted they were using Cotweet but all the apologies to people about the incident have come via the Twitter Web interface.
I'm not sure what to make of that, they say they weren't hacked so why switch from the leading corporate Twitter client? I would have thought they would need the power of Cotweet right now to manage the deluge of concerned tweets from the Twittersphere.
This story may not be over yet.
Update: Vodafone's web team sent me over this statement in reply to some questions I emailed their way:
“This afternoon an employee posted an obscene message from the official Vodafone UK Twitter profile. The employee has been suspended immediately and we have started an internal investigation. This was not a hack and we apologise for any offence the tweet may have caused.”
Vodafone seem to be going all out to repair the damage their employee caused, it's a real shame one bad apple was able to cause so much disruption.
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