On Tuesday, sharp-eyed users of third-party Twitter programs noticed something very telling on Blackberry’s Twitter feed. A Tweet urging users to download the official Twitter app for Blackberry phones had been posted from an iPhone. Yeah, why should the company’s representatives use a Blackberry to make a Twitter post urging customers to tweet from a Blackberry?
If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s how this flub happened. When you look at a post on Twitter’s site or through its official apps, information about how the tweet got there isn’t displayed. For example, here’s what the information at the bottom a recent tweet on Consumerist’s account looks like:
The tweet was posted to our account by our blog platform, WordPress, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it on Twitter’s site.
However, that information is available in the data that Twitter keeps, and some third-party Twitter clients display it for their users. Here’s a screen grab of what the fateful Blackberry tweet looked like from inside one of those programs posted by The Verge:
The tweet has since been deleted, and Blackberry quite understandably is not keen to talk about what happened here. However, CNET was able to get one key piece of information out of the company: a Blackberry representative confirmed that the fateful iPhone tweeter was working for an outside agency, and not for Blackberry directly. That could be an ad agency or a specialized social media agency.
This gives the company plausible deniability, and explains why the tweeter wouldn’t have a company-issued Blackberry. On the other hand, though, someone who tweets on behalf of brands for a living should know what information will be visible to users. That’s the kind of expertise that companies hire social media agencies for.
We can’t help but remember a similar and more amusing Twitter mistake five years ago from another brand, Chrysler, that occurred when an employee of a social media agency in Detroit thought that they were posting to their personal account, but instead dropped an f-bomb and insulted all of the drivers in the Motor City while logged in as the automaker. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to log in as a client on your personal phone at all.
How did BlackBerry end up tweeting from an iPhone? [CNET]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist