Ordinarily, the above tweet would be a standard part of a team's in game social interaction. The Cincinnati Bengals were engaged in a tight AFC Wild-Card game with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Vontaze Burfict (more on him later) had just made an interception that all but secured Cincinnati's first playoff win in 24 years. 

What followed, simply, was the social media version of the Kobayashi Maru, the infamous no-win scenario from Star Trek.

The Bengals imploded on the field. Jeremy Hill fumbled,  a pair of blatant personal fouls on Burfict and Adam Jones brought the Steelers into field goal range, and the Steelers won the game. And if you followed the Bengals Twitter account, you would have seen none of this. Not even the final score. 

A number of prominent NBA, MLB and NHL social managers were having a conversation on Twitter about the best response from the Bengal's account. The consensus is that they should have done something - what they should have posted, however, was a much harder issue to figure out. 

The Bengals finally did post a game story from their website 2 hours after their tweet about Burfict's interception. 

My perspective is this - in the heat of the moment, with the crowd in a frenzy in the stadium, there was no correct answer for the Bengals' social media manager. At the time, I argued that not tweeting could have been a good solution. However, with the benefit of hindsight and not being a Bengals fans, here's what I would have done.

I would have continued to post from the account - however, this would be a rare situation where text only play by play tweets would be appropriate. No graphics, no jokes, no real fan engagement from the account until well after the game. This is so far the only situation I've encountered that suspending the social aspect of social media, as well as the team's brand "voice", makes sense - anything other than the facts (and it can be argued that the facts would as well) would be inflammatory for Cincinnati's online fans. By posting as a news outlet rather than the official voice of the team, the Bengals could have kept their followers informed with as minimal escalation as possible. 

What do you think? This issue is certainly one that doesn't have one right answer - I'd love to hear what you would do as the Bengals' social media manager in this situation. Leave a comment here or tweet me @cknoblock17!

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