Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

17 of the most offensive and dumb Twitter, Facebook and Instagram fails

The Bankers Who Think ISIS Killings Are a Hoot

Just last week, six HSBC bankers in Birmingham, England, were fired over re-enacting (and recording, and posting on Instagram) a mock ISIS beheading. One of the bank employees – the one who nabbed the coveted leading role of beheading victim – rocked an orange jumpsuit as he kneeled in front of his five colleagues, who did a lovely job as a supporting ensemble in black tracksuits and balaclavas.

They were fired after the super-insensitive clip circulated online, of course. In their defense, the video was reportedly made during a work-sponsored team-building exercise, and you can only do so many trust falls before it becomes boring and, quite frankly, dangerous....

Here’s another one for the bulging “Kids Are Dumb” file: it seems a Florida teenager has cost her father an $80,000 legal settlement with a single, profoundly ill-advised Facebook post.
 
Patrick Snay, 69, had served as headmaster at a Miami private school called Gulliver Preparatory School until 2010, when his contract wasn’t renewed. Snay sued Gulliver for age discrimination, and in November 2011, the school settled out of court with an agreement to pay Snay $80,000 in damages, $10,000 in back pay, and $60,000 in legal fees. As is often the case, one of the conditions of the settlement was confidentiality, with Snay and his wife promising not to tell anyone about the existence or terms of the deal.
 
However Snay did tell his daughter Dana, a former student at the school, who now boasted to her 1,200 closest friends on Facebook: “Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.” Gulliver alumni saw the posts and alerted the school’s lawyers, who promptly informed Snay senior the deal was off. He had obviously violated the confidentiality clause....

JPMorgan shouldn’t have announced its Twitter Q&A unless it was prepared to contend with the public’s negative view of it and other banks.

... JPMorgan’s bankers are getting used to business deals with young men who communicate in emojis and text-message abbreviations. (“During the Facebook roadshow,” according to Bloomberg, “Lee dropped his usual pinstripes for a Mark Zuckerberg-like black sweatshirt with his name on the back.”) Yet, when the bank devised the promotional Q&A, it may not have fully grasped the extent to which new media has transformed how people share information, and how this has tipped existing structures of power.

This is Twitter’s very purpose: to allow any individual to share the same space with, for instance, a hugely powerful bank. With this space comes attention and authority. Unlike at JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, there are no security guards keeping undesirable elements out of Twitter. If JPMorgan executives expected that #AskJPM would attract only future job applicants—the kind who would don snappy new suits and genuflect nervously—they must have been stunned at the reckoning....