“Since the inappropriate tweet that was published through @VodafoneUK on Friday there have been many questions and theories (some slightly wild) about what actually happened. Therefore, we can now share what actually took place.

On Friday one of the members of the Web Relations team who was moderating the company Twitter account left his computer for a minute to ask a colleague some advice. Another member of staff who is unconnected with the Web Relations team saw his colleagues screen open and assuming it was his colleague’s personal Twitter account posted the inappropriate tweet.

Within minutes we realised what had happened and issued an apology. The individual who posted the tweet was suspended with immediate effect and an internal investigation is now underway. We have strict guidelines with respect to all the social media we use and we are naturally upset that a rogue incidence like this could happen.”

With an investigation currently underway, you’ll appreciate I can’t go into the precise details regarding what happened last Friday. That said you raise some interesting points that I wanted to respond to.

We’ve been running @VodafoneUK as a customer support channel for over 7 months and it’s had a positive impact on our customers. We’ve got an experienced team working to provide online customer service across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and our own eForum. We also have a clear set of social media guidelines for employees which were clearly breached in this case.

We take Friday’s incident very seriously, which is why we immediately suspended the person responsible. For the record, this person was not a member of our Web Relations team, who have worked throughout the weekend to ensure the Twitter profile resumed normal service as soon as possible.

Our immediate concern on Friday was to re-assure our followers that this tweet was not acceptable to Vodafone and to minimise the impact on the customer support services that deliver through Twitter as soon as possible.

The offensive message was removed immediately and an apology message was posted and followed by individual replies to followers who had expressed concern over the original Tweet.

While some commentators have accused us of spamming by adopting this approach, others (including members of the media, PR and marketing professionals) have praised us for addressing individual Tweeters directly. Under these circumstances there are no hard and fast rules, but given the need to respond swiftly and effectively, we chose the best approach immediately available to us.

Being consistent is a fundamental part of our Twitter engagement. If a customer contacts us through the @VodafoneUK channel, we will engage with them individually. Whether we’re dealing with a major reputational issue or not, we believe the majority of our followers would expect us to stick to this approach. Equally, we couldn’t afford to be in a position where one solitary response to the incident from @VodafoneUK was lost amongst the other Re-Tweets of the obscene Tweet.

We’re still committed to the use of Twitter as a channel for delivering customer support and are always looking for ways in which to enhance our online support services. We’ll take onboard the learnings from last week and we will absolutely use the experience to fine tune our approach moving forward.

Thanks,

Dan.

Dan Bowsher.