It seems an accidental tweet from Vodafone on Friday has got the company in big Twitter trouble. The tweet has since been deleted by the company but was quickly put on Twitpic and has been picked-up across the web including on The Guardian Unlimited, Telegraph.co.uk, and econsultancy to name but a few.

Twitter can be a great way to engage with customers, but whether it’s one tweet or an ethical fauxpas, as with Habitat in 2009, blunders like this on the Twittersphere are not forgotten easily, not forgotten easily at all.

The importance of not giving all employees access to a corporate profile could reduce the risk of mistakes like this happening. And an innocent tweet on your personal profile may be one too far when you realise your logged in on the company profile.

At least with good old newspapers today’s headlines could be tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers - not the same for online, especially with Vodafone’s 8,800 followers. Oh, no sorry it’s now 9,277 followers – the pesky employee may have even done some good, no?

Posted by Sally Barr

Its been a bit quiet here on the OnVisible blog recently – slapped hands all round, but a great example of how easy it can be to prioritise the urgent ‘have to dos’ and let the ‘nice to dos’ slide.

By prioritising online reputation building and engagement for our clients over maintaining and developing our own online presence, its easy for a visitor to our (or any temporarily unloved) blog to think that the brand or organisation doesn’t care.  When in fact, its often that something had to give and that something was the corporate blog, or twitter feed, or monthly newsletter.

The problem is, that once you’ve committed to any online presence, it has to be fed regularly with content.  Perhaps you could nominate several people in your organisation to all contribute one blog post a month?  Or could you poll your co-workers for topic suggestions?  Would bringing in guest bloggers help ease your commitment while maintaining the quality and frequency of posts?

Still too busy to blog?  Jon Udell has a great post about keystroke conservation – most work keystrokes flow into email messages, but are read by few people.  But in some cases many people could benefit from the content of those messages – and voila!, you’ve got a blog post.

Lesson learned

posted by gemmaT