DiGiorno is famous for their frozen pizzas, but they became the talk of the town on social media overnight for all the wrong reasons. The company inadvertently made a major social media mistake by participating in a controversial trending topic and failed to research its origins. The hashtag #WhyIStayed began trending on Twitter in response to Ray Rice’s domestic assault on his now-wife Janay Rice, and is being used by women on Twitter that have survived an abusive relationship with their partner. Below was DiGiorno’s #WhyIStayed tweet:

DiGiorno’s social media team took down the tweet moments later after backlash from the Twitter community, but not without repercussions. The company has since publicly apologized for the error. So what can brands learn from DiGiorno’s huge mistake? It’s a little thing called “fact checking.”

It’s easy for brands to get caught up in the whirlwind speeds of the social media highway, but sometimes the road with less shortcuts can prove to be the safest. We live in a world where news can travel at lighting-quick speeds, and to think any brand is safe from a similar catastrophe is foolish. The precautionary measure to take is to fact check, fact check again, and fact check even more. Need another example? I’m your guy.

Now my story isn’t anywhere close to that of #WhyIStayed, but it definitely shows that brands – major ones in my case – are susceptible to misinformation even when it comes to the simplest form of fact checking.

Yes, that was Disney Alliances publishing a promotional tweet for ABC’s television show The Middle; the only problem is that if they would have fact checked and not made assumptions, they would have properly found that the show’s official Twitter handle is @TheMiddle_ABC and not @TheMiddle. Did I mention that that tweet is still up and running? And here’s one more for you:

Remember: fact check, fact check again, and fact check even more.