How The Patriots Could Have Easily Avoided Their Twitter Scandal

Look, it’s no secret that I hate the Patriots, but I wouldn’t wish this nightmare on my worst enemy.

If you don’t know what happened, a tweet with a racial slur was tweeted from their account. It’s the latest in a long string of mistakes made on social by teams, brands, and people, and it’s something that is really near and dear to my heart.

Sure. Okay. It was an honest mistake that happened because they had automated tweet setup. But this is something I talk about A LOT. Maybe if they had watched a few episodes of the #AskGaryVee show they wouldn’t have made this mistake. 😉

‘Cause guess what? There was a simple way to stop what happened from happening. And that is: DON’T AUTOMATE.

Once and for all, here it is: if you ever get a tweet from me or a reply on a youtube comment, it is me. There is no outsourcing of my engagement.

So it’s no surprise that I am not a fan of automation, and I’ve talked about it at nauseum. It’s not my style, I am against it. Why? Because it’s straight up DANGEROUS, especially in the world social and email, and you have the perfect example with the Patriots tweet.

The amount of people who tweet out promotional “buy my books”, “check out my show”, “sign up for my course” that automatically attach to a trending topic are ruining their brand. What if the trending topic is something negative? What if the person you’re tweeting at has an offensive username (like, once again, with the Patriots)? In a world where everything is real time, scheduling is dangerous for those anomaly moments where you can look really bad. You cannot let mainstream media pick up on that mistake. Because that mistake could be the end of your career. That, to me, is not worth the upside of the automation. A whole career to save you some time? No thank you.

BUT if you really do want to go the automated route, fine. I won’t stop you. But you have to do it right. How?

You act human behind the automation.

People are engaging with your automated tweet? Great. You come in, a HUMAN, and engage with them. You respond as much as you can. You do not stop writing back to people. This is a debate in which I am always the minority. I want to scale the unscalable in a world in which people use modern technology to scale. Simple as that. I am counter culture, and I believe in it not because I’m a romantic but because it sells shit.

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Thanks for reading. If you know a community manager, or maybe just a Pats fan, you owe it to them to show them this article.