Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Social Blunders
How they Happen: from notorious rogue interns, to employee mistakes or inappropriate responses, social media blunders are an entirely new kind of risk from a social presence - they can be anything from a mild embarrassment to hugely offensive if not handled properly. What should you do? Make amends quickly, and take quick responsibility. Respond with a human tone, but take the issue seriously. Your customers need to understand that humans make mistakes, but that inappropriate messages dont reflect your brand and youre sorry for any offense caused. Kitchen Aid Kitchen Aid recently suffered most executives biggest fear of social media engagement - a mistaken (offensive) tweet sent out by a clumsy employee who thought they were posting through their personal account. But the company CEO stepped in and make a quick decisive response herself, accepting responsibility and apologizing to all affected. Wilcoxsons Ice Cream The backlash to a poorly thought-out response from a Wilcoxsons employee was responded to by the company with an unconvincing apology, and a fear-fuelled reaction of shutting down the Facebook page, leaving no positive way out of one persons mistake. Once a social issue has exploded, theres no alternative but to face it head on.
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Campaign Backlash
How they happen: Marketing for social media is like no other. Most brands like the idea of an engaging campaign to get customers talking about their brand - but exactly how that conversation will go cant be predicted. From hashtag hijacks to poorly received messages, social campaign backlashes show that you cant just let a message loose on social networks and forget about it. What should you do? Putting thought into the audience of your campaign to get the message right is of course important, but theres only so much preparation you can do before it goes live. Be on alert for reactions to that campaign, and be prepared to react if it doesnt go as planned. The best way to save face is to be humble, and gauge and respond to customers in a way thats in keeping with their reaction. If theyre having fun, you should share their sense of humor. If theyre upset, you should demonstrate respect. Waitrose Leading British Retailer, Waitrose, recently launched a Twitter campaign, asking for customers #waitrosereasons for why they shop at the upmarket store. Not quite according to plan, the supermarket received a barrage of responses poking fun at their wealthy customer base. Waitrose accepted that Twitter had control of their campaign, and their humble and human reaction went down well with onlookers. FemFresh Femfreshs Facebook marketing campaign wasnt as well received as hoped by fans, who were disappointed with the hygiene brands approach. In response, the company Facebook page was suspended, with a questionable description dodging the issue, and not a single let-down fan responded to. How FemFresh could rebuild a more positive social presence in the future is questionable. Theres no need to run in face of a campaign backlash.
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Fix Internal Processes -59% Empower Crowd to Respond to Each Other 44% Streamline with New Technologies 33% Hire More Staff 29% Outsource to Agencies 15% Respond to Fewer Conversations 7%
Altimeter, Social Business Readiness:
How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally,
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If youve suffered a public faux pas, just own up to it and apologize. Be genuine, and dont place blame elsewhere - accept it on your own. People will move on quicker than you expect, and youll emerge looking like a company that truly cares about what their audience thinks.
Hubspot
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Forecast the anticipated trend for incoming social messages and receive notifications for any unusual spikes in customer activity.
Set custom benchmarks for reactions to Facebook posts and receive alerts for those which attract an exceptionally large number of comments from other customers.
Collaborate through Conversocial to organize a quick response to a social issue before it becomes a crisis.
If youd like to learn more about mobilizing your customer service team to preempt social crises, or how Conversocial can help you deliver a quick social response, get in touch: Email: sales@conversocial.com Twitter @conversocial
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