Social media teams nap during their Oreo moments

This week alone there were two incidents of major brand Twitter accounts being hacked and taken over by a faction of the hacker group, Anonymous. Both Burger King and Jeep were caught out by lax security and governance over their social media accounts and paid the price.

For Jeep they wrestled control back fairly quickly but for Burger King it was an embarassment to watch as they were caught well and truly napping on the job and did nothing. Their lack of activity on other channels also showed up their grasp of social media being the real-time voice of a company with millions of customers viewing their stream slowly being turned into a profanity strewn McDonald’s parody.

Fake it ’til you make it

MTV tried to get in on the act by faking their own hacking in an attempt to garner more followers and attention however it backfired and nobody cared, which says a lot about their ailing brand. Ouch.

These attacks highlighted a number of things;

• Social Media is the real-time voice of your brand and as such you need real-time controls in place
• Social Media can react faster than any other marketing channel and as such you need a lean governance in place to react

If you look at the SuperBowl and how quickly Oreo reacted to an opportunity, you’ll see a shining example of a team who understand both the lean control and governance need to manage a real-time channel to customers. It was well-managed and extremely successful.

In an article I wrote for The TIBCO Blog I spoke about having a mere 10 seconds to turn customers into fans.

Oreo gets that. Burger King doesn’t. And I don’t know what MTV was smoking.