The Very Real Business Risks of Social Media (and How to Avoid Doing Stupid Stuff)

 

Parents have warned teenagers for years now about the risks of doing stupid things on social media – how what you say or show on social media sticks with you for a long, long time and can affect, well, college admissions for one thing.

Now, it seems businesses need a good whack up the side of the head about the risks of social media.

Here are some of the stupid things businesses do on social media:

Sophomoric humor,

Culturally insensitive remarks,

Sexually inappropriate innuendo,

Factually incorrect statements,

Venture into politics or religion,

Lie,

Misuse data,

Delete critical comments,

Argue with or stiff-arm customers.

Social Media Disasters

These are some of the most famous and egregious examples of social media snafus.

American Apparel posted a modified photo of the Challenger space shuttle explosion that killed all seven crew members on its Tumblr page to celebrate July 4. A social media manager confused the explosion with fireworks and tagged the post #smoke and #clouds. After a flood of complaints, the company apologized, saying the social media manager was born after the 1986 tragedy and didn’t recognize the photo.

Delta congratulated the U.S. World Cup victory over Ghana by tweeting two images representing each country. For the U.S, it tweeted an image of the Statue of Liberty. For Ghana, it picked a stock image of a giraffe from Kenya, a country located thousands of miles away. Giraffes are not native to Ghana.

US Airways accidentally included a vulgar photo of a naked woman with a toy plane in a tweet. The company removed the post within an hour, but not before it was retweeted hundreds of times. The airline apologized and said it was trying to flag the image, originally sent to its account by another user, as inappropriate but instead accidentally included it in a message. It hasn’t used its account since.

JPMorgan Chase planned to conduct a Twitter Q&A using #AskJPM. Twitter users hijacked the hashtag and buried it under an avalanche of attacks, forcing the bank to drop the Q&A before it started. There have been a number of such hijackings including a recent online Q&A with EL James, author of “50 Shades of Grey.”

How to Avoid Social Media Controversies

Social media managers can help avoid social media controversies by following these steps.

• Protect the company’s social media accounts with complex passwords. Restrict password access to social media accounts to trusted employees.

• Thoroughly train social media employees and managers on acceptable and verboten content before granting posting privileges.

• Know your audience. Understanding your audience and their sensitivities can help prevent upsetting them. But always keep in mind it’s not just your targeted audience that’s watching. Everyone is.

• Think before you post. Do your homework. Determine if a post provides value before posting. You can annoy your audience by spamming them with information and comments they don’t care about. That advice is especially pertinent when retweeting or reposting content. When in doubt, leave it out.

• Stay on-topic. Posting and tweeting, and especially retweeting content that’s unrelated to your brand or topic, increases the likelihood of creating a controversy

• Continually monitor your niche. Vigilantly monitoring your corporate and brand names for news and social media comments that may affect public perceptions will help you protect your brand’s reputation with timely and thoughtful responses. Continual social media monitoring will also assure rapid identification of a possible faux pas in your social media accounts.

• Understand the context. Knowing the context of the conversation and the discussion surrounding a hashtag can prevent an inappropriate post.

• Create an employee social media policy. Although employees can cause a social media hullabaloo, they can be powerful brand ambassadors. Social media policies provide employees guidance on how to identify themselves as an employee when promoting content, how to respond to customers, and what subjects they should avoid.

• Avoid using neophytes to create and edit social media posts. At one time, companies employed interns or recent college grads to work on or manage their social media accounts. After embarrassing mistakes, most organizations came to realize the value of maturity and the importance of having seasoned PR people review all social media posts before publishing.

• Proofread before publishing first using electronic spelling and grammar check and then using a second set of eyes with proven proofreading skills.

• Commit an adequate budget to social media customer service – or don’t do it at all.

• Take disputes off line. Avoid arguing with consumers online and ask customers to continue customer service discussions through email or phone.

• Don’t host an online Q&A or other type of social media event unless the organization is fully prepared for public attacks. Not everyone shares your corporate beliefs or thinks your company is pristine. People who don’t like the company can attack anonymously on social media – and inevitably will if given the opportunity.

• Create a crisis response plan. A response plan will outline how the organization will respond to a social media emergency. Consider simulations to train PR and corporate communications teams.

Bottom Line: Social media brings risks as well as benefits. All brands face a danger of accidently triggering a social media controversy. Even a minor mistake by a low-level employee can prompt an enormous backlash, causing seriously damaged corporate or brand reputation. Building in safeguards and experienced supervision for all corporate social media accounts can help prevent such crises.