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Video Clip of the Month: Teenager’s Snipe Goes Viral

December 2, 2011 by

A teenager’s snarky, potty-mouthed tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback contains important Web 2.0 lessons for us all:

  1. Anything you write on social media, no matter how small your audience, has the potential to go viral.
  2. Trying to control your message behind the scenes is not only futile, it could backfire in a big way.

Check out the CNN video below, my pick for December 2011 video clip of the month, on the latest most-famous tweet in the United States. To recap, Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school student, sent a tweet to her friends (she had around 60 Twitter followers at the time) talking trash about meeting Brownback at a school-sponsored Kansas Youth in Government trip to Topeka.  Her tweet indicated she gave Brownback a piece of her mind, but she actually was just in the audience and didn’t personally meet him. An over zealous aide to Brownback, however, spotted the tweet and had Sullivan’s principal contacted to order Sullivan to write the governor an apology.

Then Sullivan’s older sister called the press, Brownback ended up apologizing to Emma for the “over-reaction” of his staff, and the principal dropped the whole thing. Now Sullivan has almost 16,000 Twitter followers, and Brownback has gone from an object of fun for a few teens to a case study in poor Web 2.0 communications practices.

Brownback’s staff members should never have tried to intimidate an online critic (remember free speech), especially over a tweet virtually no one saw. They could easily have ignored the tweet or engaged with Sullivan on Twitter, acknowledging her right to complain, asking for clarity on her position, and assessing what they could do to make her feel better about her experience. As I wrote in September, engaging with online critics can be an opportunity to build goodwill.

Brownback had a golden opportunity to show he is a class act. Instead, he garnered national derision and comparisons to the beyond-paranoid autocratic rulers of Thailand. He learned the hard way Web 2.0 means, as the ironically geographically relevant saying goes, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Enjoy the CNN video below!

Your turn? What do you think Brownback’s staff should have done?



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About Monica

Monica specializes in strategic communications, web and new media, and print materials with an international or multi-cultural context. She has worked on national public outreach campaigns targeting multi-cultural audiences and has conceptualized, written, and/or designed multiple websites. Monica also has written, edited, and/or designed high-profile newsletters, brochures, and reports, including some prepared in collaboration with the White House. She holds a bachelor’s in journalism and a master of international service with a focus on international communication. Monica is based in Washington, D.C.