Recovery From and Avoiding Social Media Gaffes 101
A gaffe is defined as a blunder, a mistake, an error of judgment, a faux pas. No one likes to make mistakes but nobody is perfect and so mistakes will happen. It’s no different in the realm of social media as mistakes happen there too. No matter how careful one tries to be, social media faux pas are inevitable.
Social media mistakes such as an incorrect tweet or a tweet published accidentally as well as an ungracious response on a Facebook wall post says Serdar Yegulalp in his blog post entitled Social Media Disaster Recovery: A First Responder’s Guide, are bad enough in a personal context… but when such things happen with a corporate Twitter account or some other branded outlet, they can be messier by orders of magnitude. Social media blunders have the potential to bring shame and embarrassment to a brand and a company as a whole. Moreover, when a social media gaffe occurs, it highlights the company’s (in)ability to manage social media effectively.
In managing social media, there are three steps that management should take, not if, but when social mistakes occur.
1) Recognition – It’s no accident that this is the first step in handling or managing a social media faux pas. Surely, you cannot deal with a problem if you do not even recognize that there is a problem. It may sound easy but companies often fail to recognize when a social media blunder has occurred. This is because many companies tend to think that things will ‘blow over’ and everything will return to normal soon, until the problem mushrooms and becomes life threatening to the brand. Once the mistake has been identified, it is critical that the matter be addressed quickly and effectively. Hence, step 2.
2) Take action and do so quickly – First, the company should publicly acknowledge that there has been a mistake and it must do so quickly. The goal at this point is not to provide the perfect answer but simply to let the public know that you are aware of what has happened and to offer a sincere apology. In fact, it may not even be possible to provide all the details as to what happened or why it happened, but it is crucial to at the least, let customers know that you are aware of the problem. This can be done through a company blog post for example. In addition, the company should affirm that it has learned from the situation and advise of the steps being taken to prevent that situation from happening again.
3) Learn from the mistake and plan for the future – There is a saying which goes like this ‘ If you don’t learn from your past, you’ll be doomed to repeat it.’ This is true of a people and a culture but it is also true of companies that experience social media blunders. Perhaps the worst mistake that the company can make after a social media blunder is to get out of social media. “There has lately been a backlash of regulated organizations taking social media away entirely from their staff,” says Sean Corcoran, a senior analyst on the interactive marketing team at Forrester Research. Sean Corcoran goes on to say that “a company that doesn’t use social media might soon seem as backwards as one that doesn’t use other business tools like CRM…” Having made a social media gaffe presents the perfect opportunity, not to get out of social media but rather to develop a social media policy (if one doesn’t exist) that could identify and outline how the company will avoid similar mistakes in the future. This leads me to offer some steps that brands can put into place to try and avoid social media disasters.
1) Develop a social media policy. As a starting point, the company could look for examples of social media policies from other companies. In developing a social media policy, the company must establish its level of risk.
2) Decide on who will assume full responsibility for the company’s social media. This includes knowing who will be allowed to post to the company’s Facebook page or publish blogs or tweet on the company’s twitter page etc. According to the article, “one way to limit future mistakes is to assign social media to people who have been specifically trained in it, not simply those who seem right for the job because they have a Twitter following or a recognizable public presence.”
3) Keep an eye on your profile in various social media, especially those where you can provide official responses to negative feedback.
4) Invest some resources in hiring an outside firm to help monitor your online reputation. Third-party reputation management firms can provide both early warnings (to let you know when trouble’s brewing) and postmortems (to indicate how effective your cleanup was).
Bronte
- Posted in: Uncategorized
bronteswanston 