The New England Patriots became the first NFL team to reach 1,000,000 Twitter followers this week, and they decided to celebrate by handing out a lot of thanks.
From Boston.com:
The team had tweeted out to fans earlier today, asking them to retweet a message about their one million followers. Anyone who did so got the image of a Pats jersey with their Twitter handle in place of a name.
Saying thank you is one thing, but blindly creating a personalized graphic for anyone is very different story. This turned out to be a very bad idea because, shockingly, there were a few bad apples in that large following. None worse than this one, though:
Yikes. It’s obviously not human error, but rather a big time fail on the part of social media campaign automation. Either way, the team may want to conduct a more extensive screening process…
Update: The team has released an apology.
We apologize for the regrettable tweet that went out from our account. Our filtering system failed & we will be more vigilant in the future.
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) November 14, 2014
