Fuck up Friday: From Shift to Shit - and why we kept it live

My favourite ‘Fuck-Up Friday’ was, without a shadow of a doubt, the time we created and published a social post saying, “We are hiring for Shift Technicians”. The fuck-up was that we missed the T in Shift. This totally changed the meaning of the post, and it's safe to say it went viral for all the wrong reasons, but here is where we took a different stance from the usual panicked response of delete it and pretend it didn’t happen. The reality is, it had already been seen by thousands of people and even picked up by some news outlets.

There were two options: delete and pretend it didn’t happen, or we could lean into it. The damage was done, and with the backing of our external comms team, we took the interesting route of owning it and turning it into something even bigger….

To fix it, we posted an update to the post and in the comments to say that we had made a mistake and we are very sorry. A small typo and we got the post wrong… the twist, rather than adding back in the F, we said that the typo is that we are not actually hiring Shit Technicians, only great ones.

Leaning into this was untested, and we honestly didn’t know how things would go, but not only did we manage this in a fun, relatable way, we also got a heap of love for the correction. The correction got even more love than the original error, and through this one post, we more than doubled our followers and hired into the roles we were trying to fill in the first place.

This helped me realise that messing up can sometimes be the best thing you do. This was by far the most viral post that I have ever created, and while I would not recommend making mistakes like that, it taught me that deleting errors is not always the right thing to do, but they do come with a heart attack warning; it’s not for the fainthearted amongst us, that’s for sure.

What’s your biggest and best fuck up?