Earlier this year, Chrysler made a bold statement to the world, airing the Imported From Detroit commercial during Super Bowl XLV in February 2011. The ad created buzz in the ad world, political circles, and the entertainment industry, while helping drive a 191% increase in month-over-month sales of the Chrysler 200, the car featured in the ad. Unless you hate America, it’s hard not to feel proud of the United States and one of its core but beaten down industries after watching the full two-minute spot.
A month later, this tweet publishes one morning from Chrysler’s official Twitter account:
Auto blog Jalopnik broke the story and here’s what transpired in rapid succession:
- @ChryslerAuto tweets “Our apologies – our account was compromised earlier today. We are taking steps to resolve it.”
- A post to the corporate blog clarifies that an agency was responsible for the tweet and the employee responsible for the action was terminated.
- News breaks that Chrysler fires their social agency of record.
The root cause here might have been technology failure, user error, lack of process (publishing) control, and/or temporary lapse of cultural connection.
Within the 48 hours, an iconic brand gets a black eye, an agency loses a major account, and a person gets fired: nothing good for those directly involved. So where’s all the praise for failing fast?
The issue as I see it is this:
There is always a risk of failure, mistakes, error, and so forth, in any business. Failure is bound to happen at some point, even in systems like nuclear power plants and airplanes, that are designed with every precaution. Failures do happen.
The question is the degree of risk a company is willing to accept. What is the risk or cost of failure in this context?
In this case it seems that the majority of activity was between Chrysler and its agency. Did this action really hurt Chrysler sales? It seems that the incident was quickly contained without a lot of real harm being done. Anyone who’s watched an episode of Mad Men can tell you that it’s not uncommon for people at agencies to get sacrificed. It’s a way to appease an angry client and attempt to maintain the agency relationship.
If, as a company, you want to be able to respond to customers in real time, in a meaningful way, then people will have to be entrusted with the power to connect as people. This entails some risk. Without the acceptance of some risk and without entrusting people with freedom to experiment, it will be difficult for a company to make much progress in social business.
Well, if nothing else good came out of the incident, at least HootSuite took notice and built in a new “double-check” feature to help eliminate future “posted to the wrong account” errors: http://blog.hootsuite.com/https-secure-profiles/