Florida State Joins The Ranks Of Twitter Failures

Social media screw-ups happen. So frequently, in fact, that it takes some pretty spectacularly bad ones to even generate news around them. And the one social platform that seemingly causes the most problems for communicators is Twitter. In particular, the dangerous concept of a tweet chat.

So it should come as no surprise that today's lesson in what not to do comes from Florida State who decided that when you have a high-profile athlete who was the center of a questionable police investigation of a potential rape and was recently caught stealing crab legs from a local restaurant, the best thing to do is hold a tweet chat for all to have the opportunity to ask what's on their mind. And while these types of social media activities are likely never actually conducted by athlete, but rather a communications team member filtering the responses, a high-profile athlete like Jameis Winston isn't exactly the sharp-minded athlete you want taking on a horde of trolls.

Sure enough, the entire stream of tweets sarcastically asked about the aforementioned run-ins with the law. It certainly wasn't as big of a failure as some of the other social media debacles I've blogged about in the past (Robin Thicke, NCAA, McDonalds, Walgreens, JP Morgan), but I just fail to see how you decide to relinquish so much control of the conversation when it involves such a polarizing subject.

One easy alternative to a Twitter chat that still gives the audience the impression that it is engaging with the athlete is to simply have them send questions to an email address and do a virtual Q&A for an article to be pushed out across owned channels. This prevents trolls from taking over the hashtag and derailing the conversation. The event can still be promoted the week before across all social channels, but by making the questions private, you have control over what is posted and what isn't for all the public to see.

I get that an email Q&A with the fans may not be quite as sexy as a tweet chat. I also think that there is some argument to be made about giving up control of the narrative sometimes to help your audience shape it. But if I am managing communications at Florida State, I'm going to be significantly more careful with how I use Jameis Winston. Because it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to know that Winston has had his fair share of very negative press to match his positive.