The corporate blog has been a mainstay of business headlines for several years now, and it’s likely that your company has a blog of some description, along with the now obligatory Twitter account, and perhaps even a Facebook Fan page. Indeed, it’s reported that eight out of ten companies now have some sort of social media presence.
My question today: is anyone in your firm actually in charge of what happens next?
According to recent research from Social Media Influence, only four out of ten global companies have appointed a specific executive with responsibility for social media. More often, companies hand off the whole social media issue to, well, anyone standing around looking like they’re not doing anything, like the IT or Marketing department, or to an external agency. That’s if anyone is holding the reins at all, that is.
The report’s authors warn that companies in sectors such as oil and gas face considerable public exposure (please, neither laugh nor silently mouth the initials ‘B’ and ‘P’ here) – but don’t have any internal social media expertise to deal with the fall-out.
Is this that big a deal for the rest of us? Sure, when a problem occurs in business, some of your customers might not hear about it until you’ve had time to issue a press release and talk to industry websites and analysts. But the danger is that a huge proportion of your customers might already be talking about the problem via social networks.
Twitter, for example, has 6m users in the UK, mostly (ho ho) following the peregrinations of one S Fry, and each user has an average of 127 ‘followers’ on the network. It only takes a relatively small number of users to post a damaging Tweet for it to reach a potentially huge – and global – audience. (Think of the SWP busting that BA-Unite meet to get a flavour of how quickly information spread this way can generate, well, ‘results’.)
Meanwhile, the cost of outsourcing all of your social media doings to the wrong partner could be substantial. Furniture retailer Habitat, for example, found its social media agency had tagged its latest competition with the hashtag for Tweets about the Iranian election campaign in an attempt to drive traffic. Not necessarily the most cosy of associations, right?
Even internal employees can get it wrong, if there are not adequate policies and training in place to help them react properly to unexpected events. In March this year, Nestle’s Facebook fan page – designed as a place where users could discuss their favourite cosy Nestlé brands – attracted a barrage of negative comments around the company’s ethical history. Under attack, the page’s administrator responded in haste with several sarcastic remarks directed at protesters, which were immediately re-published on blogs and Twitter and in several national newspapers.
Compare this to the Facebook structure followed by other companies that involve more ‘adult supervision,’ shall we say. For instance, a Facebook page owned by Dove – targeted by similar campaigners – has a clear policy on the page stating that administrators reserve the right to remove comments on anyone being offensive or violating intellectual property rights. The presence is also configured so that users visiting the page don’t immediately see a list of posts from various users – they see a clear central space with Dove branding and messages.
Of course, social media is by its nature unpredictable. When you put your company or brand onto a social network you may find you’re at the receiving end of uncomfortable comments. But without proper policies, training and procedures in place, what starts as a spat could quickly become a firestorm.
What social media professionals (should) understand is that what matters isn’t the content of the conversation, it’s the tone – and when people are screaming at you, screaming back is never the answer.
If you are tasked with managing your firm’s social media site, take note. Maybe in some cases, you should offer to be, if no-one else is, to avoid such issues ever arising?
