How can we avoid social media disasters?

Although social media might be a great way to get your brand noticed and to get in front of your target audience, everything comes with a risk.

Having a presence online means you could potentially but your brand's reputation at risk, so it's important to have a social media policy and crisis plan in place to prevent it from happening or recover effectively if it does.

By the end of this video, you will have an understanding of why things go wrong, what the most common problems are and five things that can be done to prevent these issues from occurring.

If you have any questions you would like answered as part of our 'So' series, please get in touch and let us know.

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Transcription:

So, how can we avoid social media disasters?

The first thing you need to do is to really understand what can go wrong. And I think that's the problem, that we come up with these ideas for campaigns, we launch them, and no one has taken a step back and said, what could go wrong with this? So there's a load of stuff you can put in.

There's a load of supporting processes and structures and tools that you can use to help deal with this. The problem is, I did some research ages ago and looked at this, and everyone was saying how to deal with a social media disaster, not how to prevent them or how to avoid them in the first place.

So the best way to deal with it is to not have it happen in the first place, and that's when we go through and put some planning processes in place. Prevention is the cure.

So can you give us some examples of what the most common problems are?

Yeah, so quite often it's the “when it goes wrong” paralysis. So something happens, might be in social media, outside social media, and then everyone's like, what are we going to say? Oh, I don't know, we better get the PR company onto it. And then we need sign off from the CEO but the CEO's on an 11 hour flight, that's right, we'll just wait for the flight and then we'll ask what their opinion is. And this thing is snowballing and snowballing. Whereas if you actually come out and say, we're really sorry about this, we're gonna come back to you at 12 p. m. with a full response, you put a holding pattern in place at the very least. Silence is always filled, right? So that void will get filled with other people's opinions and rumors and all those sorts of things. That's one problem.

The other thing is just the pre planning, right? So if you sat down and you come up with this idea, then you bring various stakeholders into the room and you say, what could go wrong with this? And you say “no bad ideas”, you put them up and then give them a score out of 10, of the likelihood of that potentially happening. And you take anything that's got a score of 6 or above, and you say, we need to pre plan that. What are we going to do if that goes wrong? And suddenly those people that are really annoying, that always point out what's terrible or bad about things, that you sort of like, cringe, and go “they're at it again” suddenly they're hugely valuable.

They've got so much to contribute to this. It’s also that afterwards, if things do go wrong, that you can't go, it was your fault, you should have noticed this, because we already did a workshop together to try and work out, so it can be good for the culture of the organisation to do that as well.

And we said, right, if this happened, we would do this, so then there is no waiting afterwards, because it happens, we know how to deal with that, we're gonna go through and do it. Assume, at some point, that something won't go to plan. And have a structure and a process in place, so that everybody knows when the disaster happens, when, not if, when, what do we all do?

Everybody knows who's doing what when, because otherwise you lose a lot of ground when everybody running around like headless chickens, not want to put their head above the parapet for fear that it's going to get blown off. So it is just literally paralysis. The longer you leave that fire, whatever it is, just smouldering, the greater the chance it could just explode.

So, can we avoid these issues and how do we go about doing that?

There's some practical steps. So, first of all, you have a social policy that says what do you do when things go wrong. So, what is the escalation policy, who needs to sign it off, who do we go to, how quickly do we do that, all those kind of things.

You then train your staff and you train them in the policy and how to deal with these. So, quite often you get something that leaves a negative comment, you respond it or make it worse. So, you've got to train when do we leave it alone, when do we go in. You need social media monitoring that's constantly keeping an eye on this stuff.

And there's some great tools that will actually go, if there is a statistically significant increase in conversations about X, send me an SMS or send me a message or an email or something so I can be notified about the whole thing. And if you put those things in place, you're going to mitigate a lot of the problems as well.

They will always kick off, just gone half five on a Friday. And if you've got work culture as nobody checks anything over the weekend because we're not at work, you've got a massive problem because that thing will be gargantuan. And that's why the SMS thing is quite effective. Because the reality is if I get an SMS, I'm more likely to look at it than I am my email over the weekend.

My whole thing with this, you can avoid them in the first place by putting a load of processes in and what actually makes great social media normally is process. Because you're maximizing your efficiency, maximizing your effectiveness, you're avoiding the problems in the first place, and if they do occur, you can deal with them quickly.