MSI Gaming’s social media team in China recently posted a joke about a neglected girl deleting her boyfriend’s games. According to a report shared by ITHome, the joke backfired with netizens in China bitterly complaining about MSI’s post and threatening to boycott the company’s products. However, the fallout from MSI’s comedy misfire has gone even further over recent days: the offending social media post was deleted and the team made an apology, Asus enjoyed trolling its rival, and the MSI Gaming social media team in China has now been replaced with the promise to hold relevant personnel accountable.
On January 17, the MSI Gaming social media team in China uploaded a humorous post on a microblogging platform, presumably Weibo. The central message of the post seems to have been from the perspective of a neglected girlfriend who wished to delete her boyfriend’s games so she would get more attention.
Dear users and gamers, Our company attaches great importance to the controversy caused by the relevant video released by the brand-related self-media account "MSI GAMING" on January 17, 2024. We would like to express our sincere apologies to our users and gamer friends for the trouble this video, title and related replies have caused you. Through the investigation of this incident, our company has stopped all work of the relevant operation team and replaced it, and at the same time, the relevant personnel will be held accountable. MSI has always stood together with users and gamer friends, and has been committed to providing everyone with better products and services. Our company also has an unshirkable management responsibility for the mistakes made by inappropriate expressions in this short video and related replies. We once again apologize to everyone. In the future, we will be more cautious and strictly control content production and review. In the future, MSI will continue to uphold the principle of putting users and players first, maintain communication with everyone, and once again express our sincere apology to everyone and thank you for your supervision. January 20, 2024
MSI Gaming apologizes - translation
From what we understand from the translated source, part of the joke was that the girl used her boyfriend’s PC and threw some game shortcuts in the trash. The social media post’s comedic message, probably mangled by Google translate, was “Refuse to be mentally drained; start by deleting the boyfriend game.”
On January 18, Asus social media posted that gamers should “Buy Asus, don't delete games.” MSI’s original post was, by this time, attracting a lot of negative comments, and ITHome reports that Asus’ skillful trolling became a trending topic in China.
On January 19, a post was published by a person who claimed they were from MSI Gaming, and they issued a long and sincere apology for the joke about deleting PC games. In addition to the apology, they tried to explain the humor behind the joke. Sadly, the original offending post was removed by MSI Gaming, so we can't check its content.
On January 20, MSI Gaming issued a formal apology on Weibo. You can see a full machine translation in the featured text box. It seems like things got serious for the social media team behind the ill-fated post. We hope they weren’t treated too harshly for their humorous faux pas, but it doesn’t sound good. “Through the investigation of this incident, our company has stopped all work of the relevant operation team and replaced it, and at the same time, the relevant personnel will be held accountable,” says a statement from MSI Gaming on Weibo.
Social media managers can do a lot to enhance, or impair, brand support
We expect the MSI Gaming Weibo account will be pretty serious until the above incident has been long forgotten. The firm’s reaction shows the powerful role a social media team fulfills and how they can do a lot to enhance or impair a company’s online marketing.
