Dino Baskovic Can't Lose

Earlier Wednesday morning, he or she was tweeting on behalf of the Chrysler account. As I and many social-media pros do, this person probably had multiple desktop applications open on their screen, or maybe one app that fed multiple Twitter feeds—one of those being a personal account. One misfired tweet laden with the F-bomb, followed by immediate panic and what must have been some horribly uncomfortable phone calls, and by the afternoon said staffer was severed from said interactive agency as confirmed by the automaker.

(Read the offending tweet here, which was first RT'ed by @tverma29 and later reported on by Jalopnik, Mashable, The Detroit Free Press and even HuffPo before it was later regurgitated by USA Today, CNET, Autoblog and other outlets. For the record, @tverma29 has a name, and Trisha wryly gives her take on her personal blog.)

Everybody has an opinion on this incident, whether the punishment fit the crime, if one could call it that. Did Chrysler and New Media Strategies do the right thing, the only thing to do in this case and terminate the employee, or should they have taken a page from last month's Dogfish-Red Cross case? I'm torn, to be honest. I see every side of this, from Chrysler needing to act swiftly to protect its consumer brand to NMS needing to preserve the agency-client relationship at all costs, to coming to the defense of the pour soul at the center of it all. Hey, that could one day be someone from my social-media team. That could be me.

Sure mistakes happen, though for as forgiving a society as we claim to be, we are first-most cold and unforgiving, all too quick to cast the first stone, calling "OUT!" at the first strike. That's not a complaint, that's just reality. Face it, dropping the F-bomb, even accidentally, was a career-limiting move well before the web. I am a bit perplexed that NMS won't so much as acknowledge the incident on their website, blog, Twitter or Facebook. But I know all too well how that can go. Imagine the conversation: "Utter so much as a hint of this on any of your sites and we'll lawyer up." Maybe that's an unfair assumption, and perhaps both agency* and client are working up some sort of joint mea culpa, potentially to pre-empt any of those year-end business blunder lists.

But what of this mystery offender in question, alleged critic of Motor City traffic and current jobseeker? I don't really care what was going through his or her mind at the time, and I'm sure this person will land on both feet just fine. How, exactly, is what most intrigues me. Will we see this character at a conference any time soon, recounting that crazy day in March when their world turned upside down in a matter of minutes? Can they parlay this into a guest spot on Freakonomics Radio or a better gig or whatever golden egg gets laid before them, being a little older, a bit wiser?

Or will it all be a waste, just another cautionary tale for community managers to consider while a would-be web genius dons a smock at Starbucks? Because that would make me one angry f#@$%!...

* Interestingly enough, one of my Twitter followers pointed out that NMS seems to like a loose tongue.

It was 1997, and I'd just relocated to Detroit to intern for a PR firm. I serviced several automotive accounts and fast learned that the North American International Auto Show was pretty much Mecca for the OEMs. Heck, I even learned what "OEM" meant.

Things were different then. There was no Twitter account for the show—for that matter, there was no Twitter. The old MSN CarPoint was the official website of the show, and if there were ever open discussion boards on that site, I'm guessing the top car execs weren't logged on congratulating each other with "Neat concept, can we steal? LOLz!" or "Aw, shucks, we didn't win car or truck of the year, but great for those other guys!"

So why are today's breed of execs doing just that? The slew of tweets these last few days between some well-known Motor City marketers is surreal. Granted, these individuals run in the same social circles as they do industry ones, so retweeting amongst themselves is not uncommon. So on top of sharing a common passion for cars or Detroit's rebirth or green tech, these gearheads blog about college football, juicy couture and their choice of best chili dog, garnished with a little ribbing all the while...

Which is nice when you think about it. Make no mistake, these peeps are pit against each other for market share. I wouldn't go so far as to call them buddy-buddy, but they are chummy with each other. As a consumer, that appeals to me. These are real people that drive the same cars and slog through the same morning commutes as the rest of us. And as a social media marketer or PR pro or whatever the heck I'm supposed to be these days, I find the camaraderie refreshing, perhaps even representative of some new form of Cola Wars where both sides aren't sworn enemies.

I myself chat with my industry counterparts on the more popular social networks. Mostly friendly talk, usually about what we hate and love about social media, or like today, why we can(not) wait to get the new Verizon iPhone. We're supposed to despise each other, but we don't. And why would we? We treat each other with mutual respect, and not because we may one day trade favors. We frequent the same trade shows and share the same stages in front our own peers. We learn from each others' failures and successes. Sometimes, we form friendships. Without question, we do it out in the open for all the web to see.

Is there something to all this hippie love between competing tweeps? Hard to say. It's likely to rattle some corporate cages, those run by the old business-is-war types with all their tired boardroom battle rhetoric. I never bought into that personally, and maybe this trend is more like-minded souls manifesting themselves one tweet at a time. Will it sell more cars? Hard to say, though maybe that's missing the point. Selling a car is one thing. Selling a brand is an entirely different matter altogether, especially when competing brands intertwine online.

Regardless, it makes for good "tweeple" watching.

Source: The Onion