One of the problems with social media is that nothing ever dies on the internet.
It does not matter how quickly you press delete on the tweet or post you want to remove – someone will be able to find it and share it with the world. Only this time highlighting your mistake for added emphasis.
Take a look at the own goal scored by the @England Twitter account this week.
Keeping supporters updated as the country’s women’s football team returned home from their bronze medal World Cup success, the account tweeted that the ‘Lionesses’ could now go back to being ‘mothers, partners and daughters’.
The account, run by the Football Association, boasts almost 1.2m followers and the tweet was met with an understandably furious response, with reports of ‘sexism’ featuring strongly.
Strangely, it took some 45 minutes for the tweet to be deleted and even then it was done so without any explanation or apology. Presumably the idea was to pretend it had never happened, but by that point it had been shared widely on Twitter and been picked up by mainstream media.
Later, the FA described the tweet as ‘unfortunate’ and said that the phrase in question had been taken out of context. But by that time the damage had been done.
The World Cup campaign has generated huge publicity for the women’s game in this country, so it must be particularly disheartening for the players to see their efforts undermined by one post.
The lesson here is fairly obvious, but it cannot be stressed often enough - you need to take huge care on social media. 140 characters may seem fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it can do enormous reputational damage when poorly thought through.
It has the power to turn you good news story into a crisis media management situation in seconds.
And because you are never able to truly delete it, it can haunt you for a very long time.
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