Horse meat in food meant for human consumption isn’t a laughing matter. But try telling Twitter that. After revelations about burgers on sale in Tesco containing 29% horse meat hit the news on Wednesday, the hashtag #TescoProducts went ballistic, with hundreds of jokes and humorous comments flying around the network.
“Horsemeat has been found in #TescoProducts, but a spokesman says it’s bollocks”, said one person. “A woman has been taken to hospital after eating horsemeatburgers. Her condition is said to be stable”, said another. “Are you in favour of Horsemeat in your burgers? Yay or Neigh?”, cracked someone else. And “Scientist: Sir, we’ve discovered horse meat in your burgers. Tesco boss: Why the long face?”, joked another. One joker filmed a video of a pantomime horse mourning the loss of his parents in a Tesco aisle! I even got in on the action myself yesterday, tweeting “Horses for courses #TescoProducts” when referencing how people have preferences for different social media platforms. And on, and on, and on…
No Sense of Humour
Sadly though, Tesco didn’t get the joke and has been fighting fire ever since. Yes it’s a PR crisis of pretty huge magnitude if some of the stories of fines and possible prison sentences in today’s papers are to be believed. But a little humour goes a very long way when it comes to social media, and I do wonder whether Tesco could have handled things far, far better by adopting a slightly lighter tone when dealing with the Twitter firestorm. Instead though, it’s been made into a laughing stock, not helped by two simply awful tweets.
The first, shown below, is naive and misjudged. Given all the cracks about horses flying around, you’d think the person running the Twitter account that morning might possibly have had their eyes open for this type of thing.
But the second is, for me, simply unforgivable. I’ve been laughing at it all morning. At first, I thought the tweet shown at the top of this post was a genuine light-hearted moment from Tesco. And I thought it was genius. A hay joke…in the middle of a horse meat scandal 
But it soon became apparent that it was another naive mistake, having been scheduled ahead of the crisis. And Tesco has now spent hours apologising. Oh dear. Oh very dear.
Whoever is in charge of the Tesco Twitter account shouldn’t be. It’s that simple. Handled well, social media and Twitter in particular can assist greatly in a crisis situation. Handled poorly, it can (and will) make things worse. Has Tesco handled things well? Without doubt, neigh…
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Posted by Paul Sutton
I have to say, I had a good giggle about that Twitter fauxpas this morning. Compare how Tesco have reacted on social networks, to how companies like O2 responded during their crisis situations. Obviously different types of response were needed, but they are poles apart.
Totally agree, and should really have linked back to the post I wrote about 02 a while back in here. It’s all in the approach – 02 understand social and how (and when) to employ humour. Tesco very clearly have no idea whatsoever…
People always seem to accuse us Germans of mental cruelty for having a word like Schadenfreude in their vocabulary. But, go on, you have to admit there are situations when it comes in handy. I heard they are going to rephrase the list of ingredients BTW. They are going to list “sport cow”?
Can we not just chalk this one up as an unfortunate error? In the first instance, they failed to spot a joke request, no biggie. And the second (provided the scheduling claim is true) is just a really bad coincidence.
I’ve read countless pieces talking about Tesco’s customer care on social media, and how well they perform. Whenever I’ve had issues with them, I’ve found their customer service teams, especially on Twitter, to be some of the most helpful around…
Tesco have done a lot to build a credible and above all useful CS function on Twitter, and it’s not something I think we should be tearing apart over what seems to be a couple of, at worst, unfortunate errors.
I’m not knocking Tesco’s normal everyday customer service function, Olly. From what I’ve seen, I agree that they seem to do a good job. But what they are truly awful at doing is dealing with anything that falls outside of normal CS stuff. Anything remotely approaching a crisis and they fall apart. I’ve seen it before.
So yes, it is an unfortunate error (kinda), but they were in the glare of the entire UK when they did so. The scheduling thing, for example, is just shocking. If a crisis hits, the first thing you do is review what’s going on and halt it if necessary. And that includes scheduled social media messages. They need to train their CS operatives to act differently in a crisis situation, or at least parachute someone else in when they need them. In my opinion, anyway.
[...] 29% horse meat hit the news on Wednesday, the hashtag #TescoProducts went ballistic, with hundreds of jokes and humorous comments flying around the [...]
Good case study Paul. Seems like a classic case of lag in communication between corporate comms, PR and customer services and the dangers of scheduling because you never know what news might be round the corner and an ill timed tweet can cause much damage to brand reputation.