Yesterday I replied to a tweet by Travellerspoint.com co-founder @samdaams flagging up some spammy forum posts that appeared to come from Cox & Kings. A few follow-ups ensued after travel writer @matthewteller brought it to the company's attention.
Not a great situation for the venerable brand to be in - especially given three of the four Twitter users being cc'd were journalists.
So credit where it's due to Cox & Kings UK, first of all for the immediate response (read from bottom up):
...and secondly for following up with me on email, unprompted. I've just had the following update:
The spamming ... unfortunately originated from the social media agency used by Cox & Kings India, which is a completely separate branch to Cox & Kings UK. They had been given strict guidelines by Cox & Kings India not to use spam tactics such as these and it seems that this was a one-off mistake as they have been working with the agency without incident for over 9 months.
We are very aware how frustrating comments such as these are for blog/website owners so we take this very seriously. We have been assured by Cox & Kings India that the incident has been dealt with and will not happen again.
It remains a bit shocking that this activity came from an agency specialising in social media at all, even as a one-off. Cox & Kings India's agency is WATConsult, who also count Procter & Gamble and Warner Bros among their clients. Given their confident handling of this, maybe Cox & Kings UK's in-house comms team should be offered the job instead.
(Another option: pre-empt it all by following Trailfinders' example - boss Tony Russell, whose total rejection of social media caused a few raised eyebrows last week, explains his company's position to our head of news Lee Hayhurst over in the news pages.)
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