Being from Michigan, I decided to write about a blunder made by someone in Detroit. A couple of years ago, Chrysler launched their “Imported From Detroit” campaign. The first airing of this campaign was on a Super Bowl commercial. A Chrysler employee, on March 9th, tweeted an insulting comment towards Michigan drivers. The tweet dropped the F-bomb on the company’s twitter account. The tweet was only meant for this person’s friends, but the slip up cost him much more than a scolding.

People evidently make mistakes. I have several different Twitter accounts on my phone and they are very easily accessed. The majority of the time my personal account is the main one used and is what the home screen is on, however, I’ll log into another one and forget to switch back onto my personal one. With this mistake I’m much more likely to tweet something off of this other account. It’s very important to be careful where you’re tweeting from and I think this employee was careless before he let this foul word slip. He deserved the punishment he received and he’s lucky that more consequences didn’t occur. With a degree form Michigan State University, he had a very bright future ahead of him. Because of this slip up, his whole career was tarnished. I think his example of not paying proper attention is the definition of why companies are afraid to hire younger generations to manage social media accounts.  The company recovered and moved on after taking proper action towards the employee at fault by apologizing to their followers and deleting the tweet. I think Chrysler handled the situation appropriately and in a way that didn’t make it into a giant deal. By putting it on the down low and not bringing attention to it, they were able to avoid potential crisis and unwanted media attention, a smart tactic that worked effectively.

Just because someone is young doesn’t necessarily mean they are immature and incapable. The way the author, Thomases, describes interns, or recent college grads for that matter, is extremely negative. I have to disagree with with our guest speaker and this article’s author. College graduates who are young and fresh out of school have a lot to offer that older people may not. A lot of classes they are studying revolve around new ways to target specific audiences and how to maximize social media use. Students may lack years of experience, but their strategies are more up to date and can potentially better the companies overall appearance. The author fully believes that giving an intern the key to social media accounts is a path towards disaster. The intern clearly has skills of some sort if a company were to hire them in the first place. They will never learn how to present themselves unless given the opportunity.

My mom asks me all the time about social media. She doesn’t understand the concept of a lot of aspects to it all. I’m 99% positive she never has made a Facebook post in her life and explaining Twitter is still a work in progress. My mom is very technologically in the know as very up to date on a lot of things and is a fantastic writer with skills in marketing, however, handing my 47-year-old mother social media passwords to a company would be an absolute train wreck. She wouldn’t know what to say or how to say it and she would end up making me help her with it. My skills are way more up to date and advanced than hers because of the classes I take to prepare myself with. I understand that interns may be immature and that companies may be concerned about their online reputation, but the right person is more common than what the author made it seem. There’s more than one special college student waiting to take on the social media world; they aren’t that rare of an item.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people who don’t know what they’re talking about, won’t stop talking about said subject. The 2012 Presidential Election is a huge buzz right now. Every person suddenly has a huge interest in politics and seem to become experts on the subject overnight. My Twitter and Facebook news feed are beyond clogged with people’s opinions. I’m all for people expressing their opinions, but I think it’s a tad obnoxious that people can’t even use proper facts, or grammar, while complaining about something a candidate believes in. I will scroll through my timeline(s) and I can’t even focus on what people are saying because I’m too distracted by how poorly written everything is. Words spelled wrong, facts way off, missing punctuation, and just all around poor grammar is all I see. If people are going to post their beliefs and opinions all across their social media page, they can at least take the time to make well constructed sentences.

I understand that social media isn’t a place of “proper” posts. I just think that during a time where people are getting into hardcore fights about Republicans and Democrats, they should use grammar correctly on social media. If there are a bunch of people misspelling things and one person who comments with their views in a well-written fashion, I automatically think they won the fight. Anyone with good writing skills, and utilizes those skills, appears as much more well informed  than those who use vulgarity as their main points. Social media is a place of expression, and people deserve every right to express themselves freely, it just bothers me that during times of controversy and elections, people think they’re experts about the topics and won’t even spell things correctly! They’re not helping their case if they can’t spell and their posts don’t make sense.