Oh no!

Oh no!

Picture the scene – you are going to visit one of your company’s major clients (worldwide household name FedEx) and it’s a pretty unattractive place where they’ve decided to stick their HQ. It’s not long before your meeting, you’re bored (maybe a little nervous), so you mess around with your Blackberry and decide to make a Twitter post.

“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’”

Unfortunately, you are such a successful “Key Online Influencer” that you have too many followers to really be checking on who they are and someone from FedEx sees your Tweet, knows only too well which s***hole you’re complaining about and…well, you can guess the rest…FedEx are not happy and they don’t care how many people know that they think you’re an idiot.  Full story here – definition of a PR booboo.

It’s going to happen more and more as social networking sites blur the personal and the professional and we’ve been discussing it a lot at work.

The consensus is that Facebook is (largely) for fun and Twitter more for business, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter is confined to business-speak.  I use it to have “jokes” with colleagues and even the major big shots post stuff that is a world away from corporate-speak.

Come across any other social networking mess ups?

Story brought to us via @jamie247