Part of PR is minding who you put behind the microphone. KitchenAid learned this the hard way when one of their employees apparently sent out a rude Tweet using KitchenAid’s twitter account by mistake, having intended to use his own. The offending Tweet read:
“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days bf he became president’/ #nbcpolitics,” @KitchenAidUSA”
The tweet hit 24,000 followers before it was erased, and the blowback and backlash inspired them to issue a subsequent apology:
“Deepest apologies for an irresponsible tweet that is in no way a representation of the brand’s opinion. #nbcpolitics”
They further explained that the person who made the mistake will no longer be tweeting for them, and they apologized directly to President Obama for the “careless error.”
The joke in question was a response to Obama’s reference to his grandma at the debate Wednesday night:
You know, my grandmother, some of you know, helped to raise me. My grandparents did. My grandfather died awhile back. My grandmother died three days before I was elected president. And she was fiercely independent. She worked her way up, only had a high school education, started as a secretary, ended up being the vice president of a local bank. And she ended up living alone by choice. And the reason she could be independent was because of Social Security and Medicare. She had worked all her life, put in this money and understood that there was a basic guarantee, a floor under which she could not go.
And that’s the perspective I bring when I think about what’s called entitlements. You know, the name itself implies some sense of dependency on the part of these folks. These are folks who’ve worked hard, like my grandmother. And there are millions of people out there who are counting on this.