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Comment by nmilo | Hacker News Reader

Then maybe it's time that lower-level customer service reps stop running official company twitter accounts. Maybe you and I see it differently, but most of the world sees a company's twitter account as the official source of information and fast-paced updates. It has as much significance as a press release from the CEO or an announcement on the company website. So if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, outrage is warranted because they should have gotten someone more competent to run the account in the first place.

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You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.

Normally I would agree with you.

Until there is new information presented, I will continue to assert that they have not changed. (That first part of the sentence is copied from verbatim from a CSR email when explaining an exceptionally bad experience with them)

> You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.

You're quick to spread around accusations of incompetence and dishonesty.

Is it too hard to think that a corporation's main PR communication channel actually reflects the company's official PR policy, and that their backpedalling is really the company changing it's public message to reflect a change of heart in a company policy?

Social media managers form an important work program for executive's fail-nephews, so I don't think what you are suggesting is realistic.

Possibly.

But companies want people to pay attention to their twitter accounts and take them seriously right?

Can't suddenly decide they don't want them to ...

Companies want a Twitter account at all, but are forced into it because of customer expectations

I worked for a company who had sales running the twitter account.

Sales wanted the tech support folks (me included) to answer questions ... but the nature of the setup always included a TON of needed background information. So we just trained the sales drones to teach them how to efficiently shepherd the customers through the process of opening a ticket / open one for them and etc.

It kept the twitter stream to mostly sales type stuff, that worked.

"executive's fail-nephews" is still much better than what it really is, which is usually underpaid slaves in boiler rooms in third-world countries right next to the phone scam call centre.

I think you're both right in different ways -- part of the problem is operations...

A friend of mine operates social media (at a tactical level) for a very large company and it sounds like they have a good set of operating guidelines in place to prevent problems like Lufthansa has here.

Now, most of his job is just replying to the same questions all day long (and he has a small team of people to handle the volume). All of the information they give out has been pre-approved, but once in awhile something new comes along and he runs it up the flag pole to marketing and/or legal before adding it to his list of approved replies.

Additionally, he works with the communications department, sales, and marketing to create planned communications. His expertise is in social media, and he guides the communications from the other departments on what will work well on social media. But he rarely comes up with the actual message.

> but once in awhile something new comes along and he runs it up the flag pole to marketing and/or legal before adding it to his list of approved replies.

Of course one of the reasons everything has to be an approved response and you cant get "plain answers" from companies or politicians for that matter is shitty journalists looking for something they can take out of context and blow out of proportion.

Journalism is it's own worst enemy sometimes.

Mistake happens. if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, you just tweet again saying that it is wrong.

But they said nothing. For about 6 days. And on their twitter accout I do not see: hi so sorry we made mistake. AirTags are allowed.

No, outrage is warranted when countries go to war.

This kind of nonsense activism hurts us all.

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