While Twitter is excellent when it comes to keeping up with whatâs trending locally and worldwide, the platform seems to produce more than its fair share of embarrassing (and frankly shameful) situations.
One such situation was Cheapflights disturbing actions on Twitter.
Hereâs what happened over a decade back that companies can still learn a thing or two from.
As the show X Factor aired on a regular evening, there seemed to have been a terrible slip at the Cheapflight Twitter handle.
The travel search engine company usually posts tweets about changes in policies, fares or deals theyâre offering.
But on this occasion, a tweet came out of nowhere packed with two layers of profanity.
On one end was an f-bomb, and on the other was a gender-jab via the word âbintâ, a derogatory term to point to a female.
And I donât even need to go into a third word that shouldnât have been there: silly.
Hereâs the full Tweet:
âOh for f*cks sake, stop crying, you silly bint. â
So what happened?
Itâs hard to say.
Was the doing of a careless employee who wanted to tweet that rubbish on their account?
But they âaccidentallyâ did so through the companyâs official handle.
However, Cheapflights suggested that what happened was a security breach and that some malware had been used to hack the account.
And yet as soon as the weekend ended, the post was gone.
Is that consistent with the hacking story?
And to make matters, worse Cheapflights ended up apologizing.
So if it was indeed not Cheapflights doing what happened, why the need for an apology?
This is the sort of thing that companies are often not prepared for.
And it can hurt their brand image big time.
If something embarrassing happens but you own up to it, itâll likely lead to some immediate anger.
But down the road, people will probably have a laugh and move on and forgive you.
Because one thing is for sure: this sort of management of such an issue would be far tougher to handle now than it was back then.
