Gilbert Gottfried, in case you didn’t know, has been the voice of the Aflac duck for years, lending his trademark loud, grating vocals to that of their famous mascot. And thanks to Twitter, the duck is getting a new voice.
Companies are still trying to get a grip on just how to handle the new world of marketing that social media portals like Facebook and 
Twitter have opened up. Gottfried wasn’t the only one who lost his job this week because of a Twaux pas — Scott Bartosiewicz, an employee at New Media Strategies – who handled the Tweets for Chrysler – was fired for having dropped the ole F-bomb in a Tweet that went out to the car company’s 7,500-odd followers.
The difference between the two incidents are worth noting for the issues that they bring up in this transparent world we now live in:
- Posting inappropriate things through a work account.
- Posting things on a personal account deemed inappropriate by your employer.
Bartosiewicz was apparently driving through some hellish Detroit traffic when he composed a Tweet that he thought he was sending through his personal account. It wasn’t. Seconds later, those thousands of Chrysler’s followers got some R-rated material that also happened to rip on Detroit drivers. Not exactly great publicity for the recovering automaker.
I feel for Bartosiewicz. As someone who Tweets for my company, I’ve posted items that were for my company as myself; thankfully, not the opposite. But it’s not hard for it to happen. And it’s also not hard to see that Chrysler fired the entire firm even after Bartosiewicz’s ouster. But it shows me that Chrysler just doesn’t get social media yet. They treated it like someone cussed out the city on live TV during the Super Bowl or something, with damage control spanning days and multiple news articles.
But, Gottfried’s case sets a more troubling precedent, though.
I’m writing this post from my own personal blog, which I’ve been writing for over two years now. Much of it voices my opinions on controversial political issues, which I don’t shy away from — online nor in person, for the most part. It’s a big reason why I even have the job I enjoy right now; and I’m grateful to be working for a company that “gets it.” Because while I am not an edgy comedian who posted some arguably tasteless jokes about Japan (but, seriously, taste is all subjective), I’m sure that were I the voice of the duck, Aflac could find plenty in my personal Tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts to fire me, too, if Gottfried’s jokes are all it takes.
It’s true that when we share online, we aren’t posting in a vacuum; but if we don’t accept that people are going to be themselves on their own social media accounts – some of which we might not agree with – there’s a risk that this digital revolution will just go back to the old marketing days where everyone was just a shill for the company brand. No matter who you talked to at the company, you’d get the same mantra, the same look. The look of a company, not the individuals that comprise it.
And that’d be pretty much everything social media is not.
