Habitat Twitter Debacle - Part 2 | A case study in ORM

Habitat’s Apology:

Habitat deleted the offending tweets after users expressed their outrage, and replaced them with generic tweets, to cover up its tracks. On 24^th June 2009 Habitat put up a apology on Twitter.

The essence of the apology being that Habitat pushed all the blame aside, by saying that; it had not authorised the usage of ‘top trending topics’ hashtags. Habitat even went forth to say that it was shocked when it discovered the hashtag mis-handling and; that this was totally against their communication strategy.

This apology by Habitat lead to speculation as to whether the error was committed at Habitat’s end or did its PR agency mess-up? To clear up the air Habitat did tweet that the hashtags were not uploaded by any agency. So this squarely put the blame on Habitat, and its PR staff.

(image courtesy Inquisitr)

Habitat Twitter Debacle - Part 1 | A case study in ORM

Twitter:

As per Twitter’s own stats it has 175+ million registered users. Impressive number, for a platform that proclaims to be a information network; with small burst of information capped at 140 character length per Tweet.

The number of registered users is a very strong lure for companies to join the ‘Twitter bandwagon’. Today almost every major corporate has its own Twitter account. It’s ‘the place to be’ for customers and retailers alike. While growing popularity of Twitter is a fact; lack of knowledge about how to use this platform is also a fact.

Here’s a perfect case of ‘Mishandling Twitter Account’ by; Habitat is a major Furniture brand based in UK.

Habitat UK Twitter Failure: