Torontonians have been getting excited about visits from George Clooney, Marion Cotillard, Robert De Niro and…. bedbugs?

On August 24, Helen Spitzer, a Toronto-area writer, was at a screening at the Scotiabank Theatre. The following day she developed bumps on all the places that had been touching her seat at the theatre. She tried to contact Cineplex to no avail being routed through telephone hell and never speaking to a live person. When she was unable to reach them she tweeted about her worry that the theatre—a major centre for TIFF—had bedbugs. She’s since deleted the post, but in response, her friend in Los Angeles, James Rocchi tweeted,

“Bad, Bad news from Toronto re: #TIFF10: Torontonian Friend got, yes, bedbugs at the Scotiabank — aka where all press screenings are. …  4:42 PM Aug 30th”

Within 2 hours or Rocchi’s tweet, Cameron Bailey, the Co-director of TIFF, had responded via Twitter that,

“Before bedbugs becomes today’s meme: we’re on it, we’re talking to Cineplex & are planning for an itch-free #TIFF10 6:03 PM Aug 30th”

Within a day TIFF and Cineplex issued a statement that they had hired a pest control company who confirmed that Scotiabank theatre did not have bedbugs, and that Hollywood’s biggest stars would live another day un-blemished and sans-itch.

However, this wasn’t before The Hollywood Reporter, Movieline.com, Perez Hilton, and the major Toronto dailies had all reported on the allegation, some repeating them with more veracity than others.

On one level, this story is a success. TIFF was able to respond to an online allegation within a day to staunch it with minimal damage.

On another level, it has two cautionary tales.

The first is about customer service. Had Cineplex responded to Spitzer’s telephone calls rather than routing her through telephone hell, she might never have tweeted about an itchy backside and her worry about bedbugs. It’s the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Frankly, in the age of social media, an ounce of prevention is worth 10 pounds of cure because of the damage that a single person can inflict through a social medium like Twitter. Although the social media element is important to this story, the story begins with flawed customer service. The challenge for TIFF has an additional layer of complexity given that TIFF faced reputational risk over Cineplex’s customer service failure. While social media was a tool in this issue, the issue wasn’t created by social media. One needs only think of the United broke my guitar or #TutusForTanner to see that what appear to be social media issues are spawned by experiences that have nothing to do with Facebook, Twitter or any other social sites. Many of the reputational challenges that companies face are related to good, old-fashioned customer service or the customer service of their partners.

The second tale is the speed at which information travels through social media. TIFF was lucky that Cameron Bailey had an established Twitter presence, and could get TIFF’s narrative into the mix within an hour of Rocchi’s tweet. In social media, speed kills. The takeaway is that you need to be engaged in social media in order to use it to respond to crises at a moment’s notice. You need robust monitoring to see criticisms as they arise, and you need to be ready to respond at a moment’s notice.

At the end of the day, there are no bedbugs in Scotiabank Theatre. TIFF did a sterling job of responding to a real reputational challenge. But the morals of the story are that the best crises to manage are the ones you prevent, and that given the ever-increasing impact of social media on mainstream media dialogue, you need to have a social media presence in place to respond.