Over the weekend, Starbucks’ Facebook page was ‘hacked’ by several users who proceeded to use the platform to broadcast racist and offensive messages to its 7.5million fans (or ‘likes’).

Digital PR agency 33 Digital’s MD, Drew Benvie, flagged the “wave of foul mouthed wall posts” yesterday morning. “Several posts when I looked said ‘f**k Israel’ a hundred times or more. I have a screen grab but posting it here wouldn’t add much more to what I’ve just described other than lowering the tone,” he wrote on his blog.

However, though Benvie also states that it seemed to take a couple of hours for Starbucks staff to deal with the issue, there’s now no record of the problems on the page whatsover.

Nestlé’s Facebook mishap has been thrown around of late as an example of how not to respond to negative comments, as the community manager at the time took umbrage to people posting on the brand’s page with Greenpeace’s ‘tailored’ KitKat logo as their avatar. Though whoever was posting on that day responded aggressively without a doubt, there was in fact a bigger backlash to the fact that the company was trying to delete people’s posts than anything else.

This is an interesting situation. On one hand, Starbucks did well to limit the damage by responding quickly, on the other, ’social media guidelines’ say to avoid deleting posts or comments at all costs.

But in this case, some of the comments were hugely inappropriate – that’s a tough situation to be in. Benvie told us that even when you have hundreds of thousands of people within your community, online community management is 24/7. “With so many fans on the Starbucks page, an attack such as this was bound to get noticed beyond the walls of Facebook. This all happened on their home turf, but if this had been a new page not controlled by the brand, it would not have been so straightforward to manage. For many brands, such an attack would not have even been noticed by staff so quickly.”

Benvie raises a good point. Had the attack happened on another page, it might not have had such an immediate and wide-reaching impact, but the brand also wouldn’t have been able to simply delete the offending comments.

“Social media guidelines haven’t been invented for this yet. It’s an example of a new form of transparency, which requires us – even if things are removed – to be honest about it. If something’s in the public domain, but has been deleted, it needs to be acknowledged. Without that disclosure, there’s a risk that your community could start asking questions about what else you’re hiding,” added Scott Gould, co-founder of events and insights organisation Like Minds, which encourages open-ended conversation over anything else.

Starbucks only seem to step in when there are serious problems on the page, as even complaints or questions are dealt with by other customers. This is a great way to manage a community, but in this case, an official comment – or blog post – from Starbucks acknowledging what had happened wouldn’t go a miss.