Starbucks burned by Twitter

Here's an example of good social media gone bad - a few months ago Starbucks launched a new ad campaign that promoted the quality of Starbucks coffee in an effort to take back sales from the "cheaper" coffee chains. To increase awareness of the campaign, Starbucks created a contest asking the public to find their ad posters and post a photo on Twitter.


The New York Times wrote a story about the Starbucks campaign which caught the attention of filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, who had been shooting an anti-Starbucks film about their labor practices and union busting.


On the website Stop Starbucks, Robert Greenwald put out a call asking people to enter the contest and post pictures on Twitter with messages about Starbucks' labor practices. Faster than you can order a Venti-double long-extra hot-skinny-latte the Starbucks campaign was hijacked by anti-Starbucks tweets like "Wake up and smell the union abuse."


The question is, could Starbucks have done anything to prevent the misuse of their campaign? Or does this mean that large high profile (and often controversial) organisations should shy away from using social media to promote themselves? What do you think?