PR lessons to learn from HMV Twitter scandal

Last week, the ‘Twittersphere’ once again erupted with the buzz of the latest news to ‘go viral’, as Poppy Rose, the employee behind the official HMV Twitter account went rogue during a round of heavy redundancies at the company’s head office. In the now infamous tweets, Poppy accused the company directors of ruining the business, hiding the truth and using unpaid interns to establish its Twitter account in the first place. Perhaps most telling of where things were headed, one tweet mid-way through the barrage read; “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask “How do I shut down Twitter?” #hmvXFactorFiring” Sure enough, within moments the tweets started disappearing from HMV’s feed as somebody else at HMV raced to get a lid on the situation by deleting the controversial messages.

If this was an attempt at a cover up it didn’t really work. In the true spirit of today’s constantly rolling 24/7 news stream and fuelled by Twitter’s vast social network, the story hit the mainstream media channels within minutes, complete with the screenshots of the tweets kindly provided by those who had grabbed them before they disappeared.

This is an interesting story in itself; but there are some glaring lessons to be learned for those of us working in the PR industry.  First and foremost; many companies; particularly in the consumer goods sector, have been quick to adopt social media as a channel to reach their customers. Rightly so too, but (anecdote alert), it seems like many of the senior management behind those businesses do not take it seriously. In fact, this was seemingly one of the key frustrations of HMV’s Twitter advocate, who later explained that the senior management at the stricken entertainment chain had continually failed to grasp the importance of social media.

Hopefully yesterday’s events will have served as a long overdue wake-up call for those who are still taking a myopic view of social media. From a PR perspective, social media can be an invaluable communications channel for a business, but it can also have catastrophic consequences. The official social media accounts are effectively the voice of the whole business, not the individual behind it, so careful consideration should be given to who is holding the reins and what they are saying. It ideally shouldn’t be left in the remit of one employee either; businesses are bigger than one individual, so it’s important that its voice is on an equal scale.