Although most of American Apparel’s target audience was too young to have witnessed the Challenger tragedy firsthand, it didn’t take long for angry remarks to start showing up on social media. Below are some examples of the responses on Twitter.
“We deeply apologize for today’s Tumblr post of the space shuttle Challenger. The image was re-blogged in error by one of our international social media employees who was born after the tragedy and was unaware of the event. We sincerely regret the insensitivity of that selection and the post has been deleted.”
To avoid this kind of social media disaster, companies need to be more vigilant in what they post on social media. This wasn’t a post from an employee’s personal account, this was from the company itself, so controls should be put into place within the company to have all social media content reviewed before being posted. If a company has employees of different nationalities, then the company must be responsible for making sure that cultural context is taken into consideration. Research is an important component of this. It would have taken the American Apparel employee very little time and effort to have avoided this mistake.