AT&T handles apology well after promoting a phone in 9/11 tweet

Yesterday, AT&T chose to pay respects to the 12th anniversary of September 11th, 2001 by posting on their official Twitter account. This is nothing new, as many companies also did so. The problem came in how they did so:

Yikes.

Unlike most companies, AT&T decided to product place their Blackberry Z10 phone in the tweet, showing the phone taking a photo of the Ground Zero memorial lights. This led to a massive and immediate backlash from followers:

So many followers responded negatively to the tweet, that AT&T quickly deleted the post and issued an apology less than an hour after the original post was sent out:

Today, AT&T’s Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson personally wrote on AT&T’s Consumer Blog apologizing for everything.

I believe AT&T responded incredibly well to the negative criticism from the tweet, going so far as to say the image they chose fell “woefully short of honoring the lives lost on 9/11.”

I believe that AT&T won’t suffer much if any negative long-term impact from the tweet, and that is thanks to Stephenson and his PR team who handled things quickly and respectfully.

A very good example of damage control gone right.