Keira Knightley will fire you on Twitter

Sitting down at the laptop on a fine Sunday morning to check up on how our lovely viral campaign is doing, I took a moment to procrastinate via social media (you know you do it) and logged into my Twitter account.

I follow a very diverse and wide-ranging cross section of society, from SEO gods like Dave Naylor, to stars of the silver screen such as Keira Knightley (cough*..um she was in Pirates of the Caribbean..cough*) some of them for their educational tweets and interesting links, others for the sheer stream of consciousness comedy that it affords me.

It is the latter statement that this next little tid-bit of information should be categorised into,  as this morning I was lucky enough to read through the demise of Keira Knightley’s assistant Daniel via my Twitter account.

As you can see from the above, Daniels demise was quite a public one, and frankly I was surprised no one had picked up on it and syndicated it via the interwebs, so, being the kind-hearted soul I am, I thought it would be best to warn Keira of the possible online PR fiasco that could lead from such activity on a public Twitter account.

As you can see, I have already waited over 2 hours to write this blog post, two hours in which Ms. Knightley has been tweeting frequently, so I think it’s only fair that I now share the comedy and allow myself a little bit of link-bait.

But.. .and there is always a but.

This is a very precise example of online reputation management going awry, and one that we can all learn from. Nowadays with sites like Facebookfails and Failblog (just to mention a couple) our mistakes have the propensity to cause us real harm, whether “we” means a real world brand or a professional reputation, online PR and reputation management must be taken seriously when engaging in social media, something I have been stressing for quite some time in my professional life.

So, maybe this will lead Keira back to a view she expressed earlier this year:

Keira Knightley- “I hate the Internet. I find it dehumanizing to constantly check emails or social sites which have become so fashionable.”  Source.

Or maybe she’ll do the right thing by social media and take control of her Twitter account and use it as a personal way of engaging on the Internet with fans, peers, reporters etc.

I guess we’ll just have to wait for the next tweet.

Love,

Callum