Brand Tarnishing - One Tweet or Post Away from Infamy

Yikes, we all hate when this happens! You're just going along having a great day and then, "Oops!", you DM (direct message) the entire world by mistake (instead of the individual you were DM'ing it to.

To make matters worse you're an executive and you appear to be privately (now publicly) talking about a possible acquisition for your company, Twitter.

Read more here at: Twitter exec Anthony Noto in direct message gaffe.

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Ok, first we should recognize that we're all human, right?

But then again, this is an executive of a major company.

Worse yet, this could be you or me...or any of us.

It just takes one small slip and it's out in the public domain...with speculation running rampant in social media of what company the possible acquisition target might be.

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Let's just all take a deep breath and wonder out loud if this might have been:

1) A legitimate mistake.

2) A terrible mistake.

3) Part of a larger strategy to get this knowledge out into the social media domain. - To crowdsource what company the social media sphere thinks Twitter should acquire. - To reveal partially reveal their hand - apparently mistakenly - to investors, parties in negotiation (or who want to be), Twitter's competitors, the World, etc.

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In any case, it's an interesting situation and we'll look forward to hearing more to see how it plays out.

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But for the rest of us, it just gives us pause to actually consider pausing before hitting: Tweet, Send now, Post, Share, Publish, Update status, etc.

So take a breath...before hitting that final button.

And if you're using Twitter, please be sure you're posting Direct Messages correctly:

Posting or deleting direct messages

And/or make sure you know how to use DMs correctly with whatever platform you use (Hootsuite, TweetDeck, etc.).

Thoughts? Comments? - Just let us know...

- By Karl Kasca, instructor UCLA Extension (@KarlKasca @UCLAextension)