The company has introduced Secure Profiles, a new feature that prompts users to confirm or cancel tweets before sending them. In a blog post, HootSuite cited recent blunders such as social media agency New Media Strategies' mistweet on behalf of Chrysler and the American Red Cross’s less than sober tweet as the impetus for the new features.
Before the new security measures came along, "a team member who isn’t paying attention might accidentally select the wrong profile to publish their personal message to," HootSuite says. "Before you know it, you could have a tweet expressing views on anything from driving skills to drinking preferences which may not be reflective of your brand."
While the Chrysler and Red Cross incidents were attributed to clicking on the wrong account (though only the Red Cross used HootSuite; New Media Strategies employee Scott Bartosiewicz blamed his rogue tweet on TweetDeck), the recent Marc Jacobs intern meltdown tweets came about because there was no way to distinguish between a supervisor and, in this case, an intern. HootSuite also added new multi-tiered account provisioning to address that problem.
"Each of these unique situations caused marketplace confusion and affected brand sentiment," HootSuite says. "And they were all preventable."