When you’re running a corporate social media account, it’s very difficult to balance posts that will get people talking about your brand, and posts that will get people complaining about your brand. Brands found themselves with this dilemma when the unexpected news came that musician Prince died today. Should they acknowledge the news? Ignore it? Make themselves part of the conversation? Two brands that are part of Minneapolis-based General Mills posted tributes, then thought better of it and took them down.

Those brands were Cheerios and Hamburger Helper. We began seeing screen grabs of the Cheerios tweet soon after it was posted, but no trace of the post or apology on the official Cheerios account, so we contacted General Mills about the post.

They confirmed that it was genuine, and they took it down for the reason everyone assumes they did. “As a Minnesota brand, Cheerios wanted to acknowledge the loss of a musical legend in our hometown,” a General Mills representative wrote to Consumerist. “But we quickly decided that we didn’t want the tweet to be misinterpreted, and removed it out of respect for Prince and those mourning.”

Hamburger Helper similarly also posted a Prince-related tweet, and quickly deleted it.

(screen grab by Julia)