• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, May 2, 2014

At the time of writing, two things were still not clear. One, how on earth did US Airways manage to attach that picture to that tweet? Two, who sits around, slightly bored, looks at a model airplane and thinks, ‘Hang on, what If I….’?

As the dust settles and the pretty poor jokes fade away, what has become clear is that, in all honesty, this won’t hurt US Airways in the slightest. If anything, it reminded me that they still existed. Maybe they even did well by not firing the person responsible or taking the ‘it was an intern’ approach. At least that part went well for them.

Of course, as soon as this happened, every social media expert (and, sadly, social media does seem to have way more than its fair share) rushed to not only condemn the carrier, but to also pile on and spread the misery for the airline whilst at the same time pushing their own impeccable credentials. 

Of course, it was widely pointed out that US Airways ironically joined their soon-to-be parent company American Airlines in social media purdah. Earlier this month, they were accused of a massive over-reaction when a teenage girl "jokingly" tweeted terrorist threats at the airline. Jokes tend to lose their appeal when the FBI gets involved.

There's no doubt that some companies, due to a lack of clear processes and tools, continue to make basic mistakes in social media. Off the top of my head, I can think of incidents involving MasterCard, British Gas, Tesco and the infamous #susanboyleanalbumparty still makes me giggle. But I’ve never called for wholesale sackings. This is bound to happen at a time when instant communications, with rising customer expectations, drive many companies to respond quickly. These companies always made an apology and the world moved on. Nobody died. The ephemeral nature of social media seems to be glossed over when incidents like this happen.

Back in 2009, I launched one of the first UK sites to cover the social space. The editorial model relied on getting in lots of contributed content. I was concerned we would not get the amount we needed. In reality, it turned out everybody was an expert (or so they thought). We had so many contributions, we could have not bothered with our own content. Unfortunately, not that much was of a high quality. ‘Not a problem’, I thought. 'The industry is young, I’m sure it become more nuanced'.

So it’s pretty sad to see that we still hear the same old voices rushing to the internet to tell us how to avoid social media fails. Some of these guys are obviously very bright people (it says so on their Twitter/ Facebook /LinkedIn feeds) so why do they feel the urge to then create an absolute maelstrom of comments and heap public humiliation on brands who make these mistakes. I think that's just wrong, it looks pretty cheap and reeks of desperate ways to develop your own clientele and pick up some of those, oh, so valuable speaking slots at social conferences. Maybe even get a bit more Klout or increasing their PI.

What is most ironic about many of them is they've never been on the brand side. They've never had to deal with the issues a US Airways or another big brand have had to on a daily basis. It's easy to be sitting in your Shoreditch or Soho office and fire off your opinions. As the old saying goes, ‘Try walking a mile in their shoes’, guys.