New England Patriots Give Us Cautionary Tale in Social Automation

Firing up the social media automaton machine can be a huge time-saver. But like that fine kettle of fish boiling on your stove, if you're not watching it closely, it can make quite a mess of things. The New England Patriots found that out the hard way this week as an automated tweet celebrating their 1 millionth fan went horribly wrong, creating a PR crisis in the meantime. And the sad thing is, it could have been easily avoided. 

If you haven't heard about it, the blunder happened last Thursday. The Patriots had set up an automated response to fans once they hit one million fans on Twitter. it sent out a tweet. As part of the tweet, a visual was created with the person's twitter handle on the back of a Patriots jersey. Unfortunately, the twitter handle in question was a racial slur, @Ihate(n-word)s. The tweet went out to that handle and showed the back of a jersey with that handle on it. Also there was a congrats message from their star tight end, Rob Gronkowski – who I'm sure was none too thrilled having his name/signature associated with the offending handle.

Just the night before this happened, I was speaking at a meeting of small to medium businesses. All of which could benefit from having good social media on their behalf. And like most SMBs they have trouble finding the time to do it. I showed them a number of social automation tools that could make their lives easier. But I cautioned them to make sure they knew what was going to be sent out and what was going on in the world. 

Sending out an innocuous pre-set tweet that says, "isn't it a glorious day" and have it automatically go out right after a national disaster or terrorist attack can cause problems, I told them as an example. But the Patriots "oops" moment is another whole different level. They sent out an apology, saying "We apologize for the regrettable tweet that went out from our account. Our filtering system failed & we will be more vigilant in the future." But really, they should been more vigilant in the past.

It is hard not to use automation in social. I spend chunks of time everyday preloading tweets for both my company and clients feeds. Same with scheduling Facebook messages. It's part of doing business these days. But, with it comes the responsibility to make sure you know what's going out when and what effects it will have in that time slot. Those are my thoughts, what are yours?

Mike McClure – As they used to say at the beginning of each Hill Street Blues, Let's be careful out there!