It’s Friday the 13th, and here at the Grow Socially office we are a little more cautious than normal. Social media can be such a great tool when it’s used properly. However, ‘properly’ is the operative word. In the spirit of the day, let’s take a look at some of the more unfortunate mishaps with social media.

Hacked Twitter Accounts

Twitter has been gaining steam as a news outlet since the story of Osama bin Laden’s death was broken on the microblogging site. However, Fox and NBC were the victims of some meddlesome hackers in the past year. Fox’s phony handle reported the assassination of Barack Obama and NBC’s illegitimate Tweets spoke of an attack on Ground Zero. Neither of those things happened, of course, and both outlets immediately regained control of their accounts.

Google+’s Biggest Fan

A Google employee had some not so kind words to say about the internet behemoth’s new social network. And unfortunately for him, the rant found its way onto his Google+ page. According to Mashable, “Steve Yegge, a Google engineer, intended his 5,000-word post to be an internal diatribe for other Google employees, but accidentally published it for his 2,000 or so followers.” The article goes on to say “‘That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms,” Yegge wrote. “Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).” The G+ platform, Yegge wrote, is a “pathetic afterthought” and Google lacked an API at launch.”

I need to say nothing else, Mr. Yegge said it all.

Anthony Weiner

I’m not even going to bother.

GoDaddy CEO Not An Elephant Fan

Bob Parsons, CEO of the risque domain-hosting site was on a trip in Zimbabwe when he, naturally, shot an elephant. As a CEO of a large company, one would have to ask at what point was killing a elephant was a reasonable thought. And par for the course with incidents like this, the camera was rolling. The video circulated through social media and GoDaddy had an absolute disaster on their hands.

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