Epicurious Used Boston Bombings To Push Cranberry Scones On Twitter
Epicurious, the food web site owned by Conde Nast, went there: The morning after the Boston Marathon bombings it suggested Bostonians could uses some cranberry scones or some energy breakfast cereal on Twitter.
Needless to say, it's since deleted the tweets and spent a lot of time since then apologizing.
Epicurious broke a well-known rule in social media: When disaster strikes, shut up. Some brands, however, feel the need to express their solidarity with victims in a "relevant" way and, without considering how it looks to those outside the cranberry/cereal media bubble ... well, you get the rest.
Here were the original tweets, and some of the reaction that followed:
Finally, this is what a Twitter account looks like when it's in full-on social media meltdown: