Over the last month, The Nest has been conducting social media training in nine regional theatre venues across five states. Commissioned by national touring agency, Performing Lines, the training assisted venues in marketing the forthcoming tour of Red Stitch’s acclaimed production of ‘Red Sky Morning’. We helped marketing and management staff get to grips with, and genuinely leverage, social media to help sell the show.

One of the key areas under discussion was understanding the way in which social media marketing differs from traditional arts marketing. Increasingly, the social media environment asks us to cultivate a genuine, open personality, rather than hide behind our comfortable wall of artifice, built up in print and design collateral. We often looked to various case studies to illustrate this point, and we were somewhat blessed to be delivered this unique case study from England’s National Theatre a couple of weeks ago.

On 25th August, in discussing that state of the city’s South Bank arts precinct, London Mayoral advisor Steve Norris commented in the media that “the National Theatre should have a Compulsory Demolition Order”.

Of course, to the National Theatre, that is very much what you might call ‘fighting talk’, and you would expect that the National Theatre would push back, right? But would you have expected them to say this?

This is not a Photoshop mockup or a prank, this is real tweet from the National Theatre’s account. This is clearly not what we would have at all expected from such an august British institution, and clearly something went awry inside the organistaion- but the reaction that followed was perhaps even more surprising.

@DisAgg – And to think I’d thought about unfollowing @NationalTheatre for them being bland. Best. Tweet. Ever.

@johnfoley – Have to say I found that errant @NationalTheatre tweet to be refreshingly human.

@jmc_fire – To be honest, I thought the @nationaltheatre c-word tweet was less offensive than their selective tweeting of good feedback on their shows.

NJMiller – This is the only interesting thing @nationaltheatre has ever tweeted.

@LozKaye – For the first time ever I feel tempted to follow @NationalTheatre.

@samdub – My bet’s on Pub + iPhone + mistaken account, for everyone’s (my own) sake I hope no one @nationaltheatre get in too much trouble.

Rather than berate the theatre for such a terrible lapse of protocol or judgement, the audience acknowledged it for it was – a mistake, and an oddly funny one at that. And as we can see from the representative responses above, the theatre inadvertently presented itself as being fallible, human and honest. Whether it was a lapse in judgement, or just an errant slip of the keys – sending tweets from the wrong account – it nonetheless made the institution a little bit more likable in the eyes of its followers. Just for one brief moment, the National Theatre let a personality shine through the cracks.

As blogger Megan Vaughn noted in a subsequent post: “For a moment there, you were my hero. The previously lacklustre self-promotion that littered your feed was briefly enlivened, albeit with the word ‘c–t’. You, our National Theatre … were human after all. Moreover, you were right! Steve Norris is clearly a massive c–t! Hooray for you! Hooray for the National Theatre! Hooray for passionate tweets about relevant issues!”

However, the theatre’s response to all of the above saw them revert swiftly, and sadly, back to type. Rather than admit that someone on staff had clearly stuffed up, or perhaps a disgruntled former employee still knew their login passwords, the theatre instead deleted the post and announced that they “believed” that they had been hacked.

The response to this tweet was less than enthusiastic:

@sarahmade – Oh the poor employee at the @NationalTheatre who got their accounts mixed up. Hack? Yeah right. #cringe

@andytfield – To be honest. The fact @NationalTheatre can’t admit that someone said that shows everything that’s wrong with that organisation.

@joannahc – Between @catbinlady ‘s tweets and @NationalTheatre pretending they got hacked, today is a rather amusing Twitter day.

It was clear that the audience didn’t believe the theatre’s explanation (or excuse) for the lapse of judgement. Mistakes do happen in social media, and – if we’re honest about them – users are generally a very forgiving bunch. If we’re dishonest, experience has shown that the audience may well turn against us, and ultimately we’ll come unstuck.

So what we can learn from all of this? (other than making sure we update our Twitter account password more regularly!)

Two guiding principles in social media, we believe, are to Be Human and Be Honest. Had the National Theatre adopted either policy, they might have done themselves a service.

To err is human, and ‘being human’ is increasingly what we respond to when bumping into organisations online. Social media differs from traditional marketing by asking us to ‘be human’, to drop our guard a little and be conversational – to get in amongst our audience and act like ‘real people’ (this shouldn’t be terribly difficult, we are ‘real people’ after all). Cutting and pasting marketing copy from a brochure does not, sadly, make us ‘real people’ – listening, asking, responding and entertaining are all good principles to focus on.

Secondly (as we see so often), there is nowhere to hide on the internet. If we attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of our audience, be sure that someone will either find you out, or be sufficiently suspicious to take you to task on it. If we make a mistake – even one as gut-wrenching as the National Theatre’s example – the best thing we can do is to admit to it, offer a genuine ‘mea culpa’ and move on. Today’s tweet is tomorrow’s digital trash – everything will soon blow over, and your audience will thank you and respect you for your honesty.

The National Theatre should have ‘fessed up’ and come clean about what really happened – rather than try to blame it it on a spurious ‘hack’. And they should also have taken note of the audience feedback – who clearly craved a more likeable and ‘human’ National Theatre.  Their subsequent tweets are sadly ‘business as usual’ PR announcements, the brief flash of ‘real’ personality now glaringly absent.

Megan Vaughan offers some words of consolation for the poor soul that might have been responsible for this whole charade (in a post refreshingly titled ‘An open letter to the marketing dude at the National Theatre who posted ‘c–t’ to their Twitter account‘): “I just hope that when the bigwig dudes read through your @replies (and they must), they can see the messages of support you received for finally giving the National Theatre some personality”.

What we can learn is that the real crime on social media is not accidentally posting from the wrong account – the real crime is to not be our selves.