#media gatekeepers

Every Sunday when I was a kid in the tiny New York town of Hillsdale, my parents would drive five miles down a dirt road to the local grocery store to pick up the New York Times. My parents were transplants from the greater metropolitan area of New York City; I imagine that great hunk of newsprint helped them stay connected to the life they had—albeit willingly—left behind. My mother immersed…

Vodafone claims to have made the first UK mobile phone call a few minutes past midnight on 1st January 1985.  Fast-forward 25 years and it is hardly surprising that Vodafone have a significant presence in the social media world.  Indeed, their customers would expect the company which sells the launch-pad into the blogosphere and beyond - the Smartphone - to be a bit handy with the technology it offers.  A smart, considered social media strategy is important for most organisations, but especially so when that organisation boasts a reputation for technological innovation.

Vodafone on Twitter

#Vodafone UK is a customer service channel which forms part of Vodafone’s ‘Web Relations’ team.  They deal directly with customers’ queries and offer advice directly to those experiencing problems with Vodafone’s service.  The difference between Vodafone’s telephone helpline and its Twitter ‘helpline’ is that those Tweets are public, whereas the phone conversations are private. This presents both opportunities and problems.  From a PR perspective, Twitter provides a genuine Grunigian http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Bs4ISeYi1qkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=grunig+model+of+excellence&hl=en&ei=Nky3TYuAIYKu8QP86Z1A&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CDcQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q=grunig%20model%20of%20excellence&f=false opportunity to have conversations with customers in his ‘two-way symmetrical’ model (1973), receiving feedback and having a public chance to respond.  Yet, it is not necessarily PR people who are in control of the messages but more likely customer service staff.  With 25,000 followers and a large number of customer relations personnel having access to one official Vodafone Twitter account, there is always potential for a PR problem.

 In 2010, an employee at Vodafone’s customer service centre in Stoke posted an obscene Tweet on the official Vodafone Twitter page which resulted in hundreds of angry messages asking whether their account had been hacked.  The rogue tweet read: “Vodafone UK is fed up with dirty homo’s and is going after beaver” and because the comment was public, one employee’s misdemeanors resulted in a national story affecting Vodafone’s reputation. A spokesperson for Vodafone released a statement saying the employee had been suspended and they would be conducting an investigation.