BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Social media has become such a big part of the daily cultural experience in America, even for business, and retailers including those in the convenience-store industry have been exploring how best to use it for enough years now, that it’s easy to forget there are no rules, and that it can be used maliciously.
Plaid Pantries Inc., a 110-unit c-store chain based in Beaverton, Ore., learned that lesson the hard way when someone created a fake Plaid Pantries account, @PlaidPantryInc on Twitter and began posting less-than-complimentary comments, appropriating the chain’s official logo.
Most of the tweets allude to drinking, drugs, sex, robberies and cars crashing into the stores. Some of the milder tweets:
Construction delays on @trimet are nothing an ice cold 24oz can of malt liquor in a paper sack can't fix.
— Not Plaid Pantry (@PlaidPantryInc) August 23, 2016
The weekend doesn't have to end! Call in sick today if by some miracle you still have a job, and chill out with an ice cold @CoorsLight.
— Not Plaid Pantry (@PlaidPantryInc) October 3, 2016
If you aren't still wide awake from last night's debauchery, stop in for a hot cup of fresh coffee to jump-start your day #NationalCoffeeDay
— Not Plaid Pantry (@PlaidPantryInc) September 29, 2016
As you wonder where the summer went, remember that your tan will fade, but your drunken mistakes will haunt you forever.
— Not Plaid Pantry (@PlaidPantryInc) August 29, 2016
“We were made aware of it when a local newspaper, The Oregonian, contacted and asked me if it was our account,” Jonathan Polonsky, president of Plaid Pantries, told CSP Daily News. “We didn’t condone it.”
While the chain does have a website and mobile app, Plaid Pantry does not use social media of any kind. It does not have official Twitter, Facebook or other accounts.
“Our social-media strategy is not to have a strategy,” Polonsky said. “We don’t think it’s a win-win situation, so we decided that instead of doing it poorly, we wouldn’t do it at all. There was not a lot of upside from our point of view. We decided to not engage.”
Through an arduous process, Polonsky finally convinced Twitter to get the owner of the account to make it more explicit that it was not a Plaid Pantry account. It also posted a notice that reads: “Please fix your account.”
“It was shocking to me how hard it was to even get that done,” he said. “I had to prove that I was authorized to act on behalf of Plaid Pantry, and once I crossed that hurdle, I had to prove that we owned the trademark, and prove that they were doing something malicious from our point of view.”
The account holder has since altered the account profile to read “Not Plaid Pantry.”
“We’re still not comfortable with that, because they are still using our logo,” said Polonsky. “So I’ve got a call into our trademark attorney to figure out what course of action is open to us.”
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