Many people miss out on job opportunities because the company they applied to found something embarrassing on their social media. You know, like a picture of them drunk, or a weird political rant they’d forgot about, or their detailed multi-part plans to embezzle the hell out of whoever is foolish enough to hire them. Well, two can play that game, and there are plenty of examples of big businesses and their expensive marketing teams looking like a bunch of jackasses online. Here are 11 of our favorites.
The only thing older and lamer than the “said no one ever” meme is the “Juan/one” pun, so Dave & Busters decided to spice things with a little casual racism. This went over about as well as you might imagine, and D&B’s ended up apologizing for the tweet less than an hour later. Time will tell if the chain has learned its lesson or if they’ll repeat the joke with an eggroll special and the name Wong.
Shortly after the Ray Rice video leaked, #WhyIStayed started trending on Twitter as a way for abuse survivors to share their stories…and as a way for DiGiorno’s to share how delicious their pizza was. To their credit, DiGiorno’s quickly realized their mistake and set about making amends. Unfortunately, they chose to do so using the same twitter account and avatar, making it seem like a talking pizza spent half the night apologizing for domestic violence.
Man, people just can’t get enough domestic violence jokes, can they? Chicago-area grilled-cheese restaurant Cheesie’s Pub & Grub briefly promoted a “knockout” deal named after Ray Rice. Cheesie’s claimed it was the work of a disgruntled employee who had access to the Twitter account. They fired both the employee and the person in charge of making sure nobody made wife-beating jokes under the company name, and then hired a professional social media company to run the Twitter moving forward. Hopefully, this will work out better for them than it did for DiGiorno’s.
After doing a little bit of digging, it would seem that Chick-Fil-A’s twitter team has not actually gone out shooting people with assault rifles and/or becoming truck drivers. This tweet looks like it was automatically generated by the cellphone game “Call of Mini.” Of course, if you’re dumb enough to turn on automatic tweets from a game on the same device you use for official social media, maybe driving a truck is a better career option.
Pinterest, the mysterious cupcake-filled social network the ladies seem to love, analyzes what users pin and comment on in an effort to target their email ads more effectively. As a result, a bunch of women with lots of marriage photos, wedding cakes, and similar stuff on their Pinterests received a mass email from Pinterest congratulating them on their engagement and offering them deals on wedding invitations. Unfortunately, it turns out Pinterest’s marketing algorithm can’t distinguish between women who are actually getting married and really depressing single women who collect huge amounts of wedding photos.
Every social media team should know by now that if you give the Internet a chance to name something, someone on 4chan will mount a successful campaign to name your product HITLER BONER POOP DICK. The Patriots somehow missed this lesson and allowed a racial slur to create its own custom Patriots jersey. The Pats claimed that the filter they used to block offensive language had failed them, since apparently adding that extra S to the n-bomb was enough to fool the Patriots’ Twitter Supercomputer (an 1999 iMac containing the disembodied brain of Rob Gronkowski).
When it turns out you can fatally bend the new iPhone just by keeping it in your pocket, while your company makes a phone that’s naturally curved and super durable, most of your PR work is basically done for you. You just have to be careful not to screw it up as badly as LG’s French division did, who tweeted something about their G Flex phone that might have been very clever in their unreadable moon-man language but was also quite clearly written on an iPhone. Apple fanboys all had a good laugh about this shortly before their new iPhones caught fire and started spewing corrosive acid into their eyes.
Okay, the British Embassy isn’t technically a corporation, although if you visit it between 8 and 5 on weekdays you can buy a Harrier II for tuppence on the dollar and get your picture taken with Mr. Bean. This is still a pretty classic dumb tweet, right down to the immediate awkward apology, it’s just that instead of some clueless intern it was a staff of dedicated career diplomats who decided it would be a cool idea to joke about setting fire to another country’s capitol. Maybe it’s for the best that the British don’t have an empire anymore.
Research is an important part of any branded social media post, so Delta deserves a pat on the back for this World Cup tweet that not only spelled Clint Dempsey’s name correctly but even threw in a shout out to his MLS team, the Seattle Sounders (FC) (which means “football club”) (which means “soccer team”). They get less of a pat for identifying Ghana with a giraffe, an animal that does not actually live anywhere in Ghana except maybe a zoo. Really, it’s sort of a dick move to represent the USA with one of the greatest architectural achievements we ever grudgingly accepted from France and Ghana with just some random African animal, but hey — maybe when Ghana scores the fifth fastest goal in World Cup history they can choose what picture Delta uses to represent them on Twitter.
Honestly, the only reason an airline should have a Twitter account is so you can yell at it when they screw up, and the tweet-grunt handling USAir’s account was doing a decent job handling an irate customer until the unthinkable happened. @USAirways probably intended to link the customer to the company’s feedback form, but because the Copy-Paste command is a tricky mistress, the airline posted something VERY, VERY different. If that wasn’t enough, the NSFW tweet stayed up for a FULL HOUR before someone at one of America’s biggest airlines realized they had posted a picture of a woman with a model airplane all up in her business.
This would be a pretty funny/embarrassing tweet from any car company, but Chrysler seemingly dumping on Detroit after making the city star of dozens of schmaltzy soft-focus TV ads seems almost too good to be true. Apparently Chrysler is so committed to the “imported from Detroit” angle that it forces its social media team to actually work there, but that’s probably not going to be a problem for this tweeter any longer.
