@Ed_Miliband [The Bob Holness Twitter Typo]
In today’s social community, Twitter has given us a medium which allows each us to directly communicate with world leaders and idols (famous people) and vice versa. Recently we have seen what a PR nightmare this can be for those in the public eye and today has seen no exception. After a huge race row at the beginning of this week involving Diane Abbott to which MP Ed Miliband is thought to have given her a thorough dressing down about – he has made more than a public ‘boo boo’ himself. After tweeting about the passing of TV personality Bob Holness, he realized that he had made a huge mistake. Typo’s aren’t well received at the best of times, but when you tweet “Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters.”, while the death of such an icon is trending, you open yourself up for all kinds of critisism – especially when you are such a highly scrutinized public figure.
- Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters
That said, we have to ask the question ‘is it really Ed Miliband himself tweeting?’ We know that there are a number of public figures who tweet for themselves, however, we also know that a number of these public figures which have PR agencies and interns doing it for them.
This single tweet about a figure with whom the ‘digital generation’ aren’t that familiar with and was barely trending itself, has created a whole number of new trends and hash tags popping up on Twitter. For example #EdMilibandGameshows and #Blackbusters. The tweet itself, as you can see from the screen grab, only appeared on Twitter for 20seconds. However, this was long enough for all the hype to appear.
As I write this blog post, it has been two hours since the tweet and I have been tracking @Ed_Milibands following on the social networking site. Two hours his average following was 115,200, it’s now jumped to nearly 116,200. Are these supporters, people waiting for a response to the early mistaken tweet, or people waiting to see the true damage?
Speaking of damage, we also wonder what damage this will have to his standing as an MP and how his spin doctor will turn the negativity on Twitter into a positive thing. Will this create more votes for him? Lose him votes? Or maybe not make a difference at all?
Since the tweet was first made public, two hours have passed, the hash tags created have stopped trending, there has been no apology from Miliband’s Twitter account, however, the tweet has been rectified. It will be interesting to see how his public relations department deals with this issue further and if they have something in place to deal with a situation like this.
