Last Thursday, we held the second in our series of ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefings’, at the Glasgow offices of our social media partner, Yomego, and co-hosted by eModeration and Carrot Communications. The turnout was great, the bacon sarnies were delicious and the discussions threw up some really interesting questions.
The seminar tackled the thorny issue of how to avoid a social media crisis - and when you can’t avoid it, how to manage it (you can find the presentation here, and our white paper on the subject here).
One of the issues that came up was how to resource the management of a social community that operates 24/7, and how to spot (and filter) information that comes in through social channels. Some companies (like Gatorade) set up vast social media ‘war rooms’, but for many, this isn’t practical. There are a number of solutions to this; outsourcing moderation or community management to a company that can apply resource 24 hours a day is obviously one answer; or predicting the times that your community is most active and staffing them accordingly is another. Spotting and escalating issues that might affect the brand’s reputation is tied in with this issue, and brands are clearly facing the problem of how to spot an issue within a community and pass it to the right person within the company to deal with it. Brands must train their community managers and have a clear escalation process so that issues can be spotted and addressed before they become fully fledged crises.
Another interesting question our audience raised was whether B2B companies need to worry about social media crises? If so, do the same rules of managing the crisis apply? It’s a really interesting question and an increasing concern. Our PR partners, Carrot, led the answer on this: although the audiences are likely to be smaller when a B2B crisis hits an online community, the impact of a disaster could potentially be worse: the communities are likely to be more closely connected; and B2B brands live and die by the quality of their service (as opposed to, say, Nestle, for whom the recent Greenpeace Killer Kit Kat campaign doesn’t appear to have dented sales at all).
Yomego briefed the room on social media monitoring, and were sympathetic to the generally-held view in the room that, given the volume of data presented by monitoring services, it was hard to see what was really important. Companies are looking for a monitoring service that provides some sort of context and understanding - applying analysis to help brands understand what they should listen to, what they should act upon and what can be ignored. If being submerged in a sea of buzz data sounds familiar, then Yomego’s SMR tool (which provides human analysis of the monitoring) is well worth checking out.
We also discussed corporate censorship (never a good idea); astroturfing (ditto); what travel companies can do about TripAdvisor; and even what to do about Blogger blackmail: bloggers who threaten negative coverage if their demands for money / movie tickets / free pairs of crocs aren't met. (Don't pay up).
We’ll keep posting on the issue of social media crises over at our ‘Breakfast Bunker Briefing’ blog, but if you have any comments, questions or observations on the best way to deal with a ‘social media crisis’, we’d love to hear from you.
Our thanks to Yomego for hosting the event, and to the lovely guests who made the event so enjoyable.
