Death By Twitter: KitchenAid Edition

 You don't make fun of someone's mom.
That's a given. And I'd argue the same goes for Grandmothers and other caregivers.

Well, KitchenAid broke that rule on a national scale when it tweeted an offensive statement towards President Obama during the Presidential Debate Wednesday night.

As Obama was relaying a story about his late grandmother, KitchenAid's 2400 followers were tweeted the following:
@KitchenAidUSA: "Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! 'She died 3 days b4 he became president."

Ouch. That's wrong no matter what your political view. Of course, KitchenAid has already issued an apology for this "irresponsible tweet", asthe company should. But it begs the continuing question of HOW things like this are still happening!?

According to Cynthia Soledad, head of KitchenAid, the tweet was posted by a member of its Twitter team who mistakenly used the KitchenAid handle instead of a personal handle. Big mistake.

Two main takeaways for everyone watching this gaffe unfold:
If You Tweet For A Company: DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING! Even triple check every tweet's handle before you post. Better yet, use different devices for different Twitter handles. These types of mix-ups happen frequently and, on this big of a scale, no mistake goes unseen.

If You Have People Who Tweet For Your Company: You have several choices here. Obviously you need to hold your Social Media teams to a high standard. But you also need to know that these errors happen. It could be wise to set up precautionary measures that may save you big in the long run. First, you could set up a protocol that calls for each tweet to be reviewed by another member of the team before it is posted. Another idea is to provide devices for your teams and only allow company Tweets to be sent from a company device. You also could establish accounts that delay a post for 4 minutes before it is officially tweeted. This could give the sender or a supervisor a moment to review even after the Tweet button has been pressed. Tweet4Me and TweetDeck both offer delay functions.

What do you do personally or professionally to control tweets?