Twitter blunder

Twitter in US is used very frequently with companies promoting and encouraging the usage of Twitter amongst the employees.

A niche company called UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) offers Twitter bonuses of $5000 per category with 3 categories: most followers, biggest increase in percentage of followers and the most creative tweets. In the case of UFC, their employees are fighters who gets paid per showing of an event (usually 3-4 times a year) to compete with another fighter. The fighter's pay begin at $6000 per showing with a win bonus of the same amount and only a handful of the top fighters earn six figure fight money making a bonus of $5000 to be more than enough of an incentive for the employees to get active on the twitter network.
People who have yet to have a twitter account would jump at the opportunity no doubt. The problem with this is there were several tweets that went out of hand with the intention gaining more followers and get creative through generating humour and shock value with their tweets.
Forrest Griffin, a popular UFC fighter tweeted on November 2011

In a sensitive world like today where everything public is expected to be political correct, this has sure to offend a lot of people. The fighter copped a lot of flack and an earful from the boss for the idiocy and however there were no fines from the employer for this misbehaviour.

A month later another fighter Miguel Torres quoting from a sitcom tweeted
“If a rape van was called a surprise van, more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.” which he later changed the word 'rape' to 'windowless'
it was too late, the damage is done, this time the consequences were a lot harsher, an immediate termination of Torres's job.
The treatment of the Torres was felt inconsistent by many also due to that another fighter Rashad Evans, not in twitter but in a public avenue, at a pre-fight press conference 'in the heat of the moment' clearly referenced an incident about a school staff and the act of sexual assault on children and received no formal repercussions.

 The president of the company Dana White retorts "We don’t come out at the UFC with these canned statements that are written by our lawyers. We handled everything on a case-by-case basis with the idea that people are going to make mistakes and it’s how you handle yourself after you make that mistake", and concludes "When you’re getting ready to twitter, or you’re getting ready to say something, think about what you’re going to say. Think about what you’re going to tweet and use a little common sense."

While he did bring up a good point of using common sense which all should, the treatment between fighters has been biased and unfair because there were no official guidelines as to what would happen and what makes one more message tolerable than the other. The two fighters that were safe are a much bigger draw of audience for UFC events meaning more revenue, hence the lesser known fighter was to be made an example of. Since there were no pointers on how to conduct oneself in social network so people will only find out after the damage is done however to their credit till now no one else has been stupid enough to post controversial and/or offensive tweets.

For public companies, they know it is better to prevent problems than to fix, could this have been prevented had there been guidelines or policies?