Avoid Social Media Disaster; Learn From the Mistakes of Others

Trust- The basis for any engagement or exchange over social channels is a prerequisite for engagement on any meaningful level.

Authority- Make sure you are one of the most obvious sources for the information you’re relying on for content. All messages should be confident, but not disparaging.

Gratitude- Be grateful for your successes, and even the chance to participate. Thank everyone you speak with, and believe in that gratitude.

Empathy- Understand where your customers are coming from. Never doubt a comment, and make sure you don’t answer a peasant as a king.

It is becoming an increasingly regular occurrence to hear about mass outrage in response to corporate policy and statements made as part of or in response to social media marketing campaigns. A primary reason for building your online presence through social networks is to improve your image or the image of your company. Negative perceptions and hurt feelings may increase your audience, but it can sometimes create a pre-disposition towards hating your brand that is impossible to overcome.

So if the whole goal of social media marketing is to improve customer relations and perception through engagement, why are the results negative so often?

Practices

Social startup Allthis.com became a hot topic earlier this week when the blogosphere picked up on their practice of creating profiles from public data available from Twitter for influential and popular people without their consent. The profiles insinuated that through Allthis.com you could purchase 10 minutes of Mark Zuckerberg’s, or Seth Godin’s time in exchange for the site’s online currency that can be bought with real money. Of course the outrage wasn’t coming from people like Mark Zuckerberg; it was coming from otherwise inconsequential bloggers who are anxious to lead a bloodthirsty mob that mobilizes against a cause their blog sparked, for publicity and self-realization of course.

The response from Allthis.com was one of confusion which is probably at least partly genuine. Their website has been online and selling time for a few months now, and mining public profile data from social networks as well as from other mediums is a widespread practice that has ushered the current era of Internet startup prosperity. Google takes some flak from violating user privacy, but for the most part they fly under the radar. Startups battle the fact that their applications have little applicable utility that is heavily relied on, and websites such as Klout and Allthis.com also made the mistake of using people who had not signed up as a reason for others to sign up. Allthis.com eventually conceded the creation of profiles for people who hadn’t signed up, but their response was relatively slow, and even a pleasant demeanor comes off as conceited and pompous when you lack empathy.

Other social media disasters have come in response to changes that occur in the physical world, but by companies that have close ties to the Internet. Outrage over the Netflix price hike earlier this year was unparalleled in damage done mostly because of the viral spread of discontent across social platforms and in news story comments. Sometimes social media campaigns run smoothly, but are derailed by a single detail that not only costs any gains the campaign made, but also costs the trust of customers the company has been building since before the Internet was used for social media. Nissan suffered extensive backlash earlier this year when the Australian division held a competition on Facebook and awarded a $20,000 car to a friend of one of the staffers who was managing the competition. Trust is a prerequisite in social media, and any violation of trust is irreparable.

Where you stand

The latest ongoing mass outrage is the result on the popular domain registrar Go Daddy’s public stance in favor of the SOPA bill. The Stop Online Piracy Act is heavily polarizing, and even though the specific terms are still being negotiated and the possible effects it will have on domestic webmasters is unclear, the nature of any measure that gives the Federal Government jurisdiction in cyberspace is at odds with the sentiment of the majority of citizens. A public boycott post on Reddit reach 2500 comments, leading hundreds to pledge to transfer their domain to another provider on December 29, which has become known as “move your domain from Go Daddy Day”.

Go Daddy touts the SOPA act as a bill that will protect the intellectual property of millions of hardworking Americans, but popular opinion considers it an infringement on basic freedoms that have evolved organically and naturally. In reality popular opinion and condemnation is extremely effective at policing the Internet in instances when people agree an injustice has been committed. Go Daddy is in a unique position, being the largest domain name registrar with over 50 million domain names, where it has become practical to have several full time lobbyists on staff to lobby for legislation that is beneficial to their business. In instances such as the SOPA bill’s passage through congress, they have little choice but to take a public stance. When you do business on the Internet it is important to keep a strict code of morals and ethics, and to side with overwhelming majorities or keep your opinions to yourself in times of crisis. There is a perfect storm of hyper-sensitivity among the public coupled with various routes of information propagation that delivers and spreads news faster than ever before.

Responses

The simple fact is that social media requires near perfection to do right. Responses to positive reviews and comments need to be gracious, unique and personal. Responses to complaints and negative comments must be tactful, empathetic, apologetic and express the desire to remedy the situation. Ignoring a neutral comment can create a negative perception if the customer is expecting a response, regardless of the priority or importance.

When Klout responded to the initial outcry that was due to a change in their scoring algorithm with rhetoric such as “transparency” that wasn’t backed up with concrete actions, it only served to amplify the discord. If Allthis.com had taken the first negative blog posts seriously and not played dumb to inquiries, regardless of the facts, they could have salvaged popular opinion and became known as a proactive startup that listens to people.

Even with widespread failure in social media, there are lots of successful campaigns, and even more successful representatives. There are even winners in these disasters, including bloggers who broke the stories, competitors that were on the brink of bankruptcy but are now thriving, and it’s yet to be seen whether all of the bad press generated from social media disasters is all bad.

Base all of your online interaction on these four principles and there is little room for an irreversible PR debacle that will be covered in hundreds of blog posts just like this one.

Trust- The basis for any engagement or exchange over social channels is a prerequisite for engagement on any meaningful level.

Authority- Make sure you are one of the most obvious sources for the information you’re relying on for content. All messages should be confident, but not disparaging.

Gratitude- Be grateful for your successes, and even the chance to participate. Thank everyone you speak with, and believe in that gratitude.

Empathy- Understand where your customers are coming from. Never doubt a comment, and make sure you don’t answer a peasant as a king.