PR blunder as Vodafone sack marketer over funny Twitter
Vodafone suffered a sense of humour failure and sacked one of its marketing team for tweeting that rival network T-Mobile should call them after suffering technical difficulties.
This happened at the end of last week in Hungary when a Vodafone employee ReTweeted – or republished – a Tweet from T-Mobile that explained its network was down.
To begin with @tmobilehungary had tweeted: “Hungary´s T-Mobile network partly down, software to blame” and followed it up with: “There will be an official statement (released) about the network problem. Please be patient!”
It was this second Tweet that Müller Tamás decided to RT @tmobilehungary via the official @Vodafone_HU account and said:“OK, give us a ring! ;) RT @tmobilehungary There will be an official statement (released) about the network problem. Please be patient!”
That ‘OK, give us a ring! ;)’ cost him his job and Vodafone swiftly commented that this had been unauthorised and dismissed the member of staff responsible – but did joke in its own statement that it would help T-Mobile fix the problem. Er... isn’t that where it went wrong for Müller Tamás?
Yet another spectacular example of a company over reacting to the often irreverent nature of social media and in doing so attracting negative publicity, defeating the whole point of using it in the first place!
It is early days, but the story has been limited to only a few technical websites and blogs, but I read about it after @clmlawbits in Newbury retweeted someone else talking about the incident. Now Morgan PR has blogged about it and we’ll tweet about that, add it to Facebook and mention it on LinkedIn too. I think the cat is out of the bag.
Ironically, it was a clever piece of marketing as Vodafone drew attention to the fact that the T-Mobile network was down to its own followers. When you remember that marketing should be directed at existing as well as new customers, this would have engendered loyalty among followers who use Vodafone, who presumably want reliability in their mobile service provider.
Lost not in translation but in the uproar was the fact that T-Mobile had actually been really savvy by using Twitter to keep customers informed about a technical problem they were rushing to fix and probably spared their call centre a multitude of frustrated callers. Perhaps without Vodafone over reacting, the rival network might have got a bit more kudos!
You can be confident this overshadowing of T-Mobile was coincidental! Clearly though Vodafone recognised it when they commented officially. Shame that they still sacked Müller Tamás.