PR tip: how to avoid a Twitter meltdown

By now many have heard about Christian Bale and his very unprofessional melt down captured and shared among millions on YouTube, which spread like wildfire into a top 5 topic on Twitter. The following Twitter meltdown unfolded today. Thankfully, the exchange was not at all as brutal as Christian Bale's outburst but, nevertheless this could have been avoided. To set the stage, the Twitter melt down involves a male and female, one a reporter and the other a Marketing/PR representative.

The following exchange captures the f-bombs and tweets going back and forth between the two parties. April, the PR rep, wasn't naming the reporter directly when she posted a tweet, venting her frustration, just as many of us do on Twitter (yours truly included). The reporter clearly had a bad day, noticed the PR rep’s tweet and followed up in a highly abusive way with her. After the Twitter throw-down, it seemed like the reporter wanted to forget about the whole exchange and consequently tried to erase his tweets. Unfortunately, the public journo/PR fight got retweeted and suddenly it was all over. Lesson to be learned here. Before you go dropping any F-bombs via a tweet, digg post, IM, blog comment, facebook post, etc., do remember you can't erase what is out there on the ether. A public record exists and there is no turning back.