HMV PR Crisis.

Another week another blog folks! Everybody is aware of the power of social media today, we are being told over and over again how important it is to have this medium of contact with our customer and  there is plenty of proof of how powerful social media is in everyday business life for a strong ,customer-business relationship. We have also seen how important it is during a PR crisis, and how it can turn people’s opinions around when used correctly.

What happens however when this power is abused? An example of this came about on the last day of January when one companies Twitter became hacked and was taken over for a period of time. The incident occurred when a large number of HMV employees were sacked on January 31st.

HMV is a British entertainment retailer that sells a range of products including CD’s, DVD’s, headphones and many other entertainment products. 

On the 31st of January when it was revealed that staff within the firm had lost their job one fired member of the company overtook their Twitter and tweeted from the companies official Twitter page a total of 7 times. Here are the tweets:(read from bottom to top)

As you can see they fired employee was obviously angry at being sacked, but in fairness the tweets could have been a lot more damaging for the company e.g. if they had released company secrets.

The hacker revealed herself on her personal page, her name is Poppy Rose and in the tweets she said she would apologise for the tweets however she felt someone had to speak out on the issue. Here are some of the tweets she made after the incident:

HMV eventually regained control of the Twitter page and deleted the tweets immediately, although as we know anything on the internet is never really permanently deleted! They then issued a number of tweets stating that there had been job loses but that the company was still business as usual. Here are the tweets the company made once they had control again:

They made two minor mistakes in these tweets, one was including a hashtag that had been used in one of the hacker’s tweets ,#hmvxfactorfiring, this allowed people to click on the hashtag and see what people who had read the previous hackers tweets to see all the feedback and backlash to them. The other mistake they made was saying that yes people had been fired, but not in their stores, perhaps somehow suggest that the fired staff had not been had important as store staff.

The hacking of the HMV Twitter page raises a number of questions over the security and passwords systems that the company were lacking once. Once they had fired the employee that was usually in charge of social media had been let go passwords should obviously have been changed. This was an easily prevented situation. It also makes me think what security measures companies have in place in regards their social media sites. I hope after this situation that companies whose social media sites are not efficiently protected put systems in place to prevent situations like this happening again. The employee responsible, as I’ve said, could have done a lot more damage to the company.

Thanks for reading!

Cici