Words: Claire Murphy
Picture the scene: phones ringing off the hook; floods of e-mails deluging panicked staff, and the CEO in hiding as share prices go into freefall. A fire at HQ? Terrorism at the plant? No – today’s business nightmare is a social media disaster.
And when it strikes, all eyes will be on the marketing team as they try to figure out the next step – and what went wrong in the first place.
The furore on social networking sites following the phone hacking scandal at News International is widely credited with accelerating the closure of the 168-year-old News of the World. Elsewhere, the failure of BP to devise an effective social media strategy following the Deepwater Horizon oil spills has helped to shave an estimated $1bn (£614m) off the company’s brand value. This is brand management territory, and every marketer needs a disaster plan.
Risky business
Many companies trigger their own social media problems, which can follow an ill advised tweet or a comment on the brand’s Facebook page.
A research study released in July by digital communications agency The Group found that 56 per cent of FTSE 100 companies now run a corporate Twitter account – up from 40 per cent in December. Over the same period, the proportion of FTSE 100 companies with a Facebook page has gone up from 25 per cent to 38 per cent. But while these channels offer the modern marketer a sizeable audience, the risks are high.
Nestlé discovered this to its cost in March last year. After the food company had been accused of environmental recklessness related to palm oil use, some
of the food company’s Facebook fans altered their profile pictures into parodies of its logo. The moderator asked them to stop, and the dialogue quickly descended into a sarcasm-fuelled bunfight. The spat was speedily transmitted across other social media platforms, fuelling negative feeling towards the Nestlé brand and earning the firm a reputation as heavy handed and authoritarian.
Interbrand chief executive Graham Hales comments: “Social media offers brands an opportunity to have a conversation, so if
a brand puts itself into a position of authority, it can feel misplaced.” Brands have to adapt quickly to the new rules created by social media, he says. “In the online world, one of the interesting challenges for brands is that one consumer’s voice is as good as a corporation. Companies have to approach social networks with a degree of humility, and recognise the conversational value of social media.”
Other companies can devalue their brand by tweeting insensitive or irrelevant material. Eurostar enraged customers during the Channel Tunnel crisis in 2009, when 2,000 people were stranded. The company was slow to respond to the crisis via social media – still tweeting about holiday packages as trains were being cancelled and people rescued. Other gaffes include US designer Kenneth Cole’s misguided attempts at irony when staff tweeters tried to link the uprising in Egypt earlier this year to excitement about the launch of a line of clothing.
Public and private lives
The nature of social media creates great potential for employees to mix their private social media identities with their work obligations. Vodafone landed in hot water after a staff member accidentally posted an obscene message on its Twitter account. Hales believes this incident shows that developing brand awareness within company culture, as well as outside it, has become crucial. “Companies have to make sure their brand is as strong internally as
it is externally. This doesn’t have to be
done in a heavy-handed way, but people should have an understanding of what it means to work in that organisation and a sense of accountability,” he says. “Within the confines of social media, staff need to understand that what they communicate
is going to be seen by a much wider audience than they might anticipate. Twitter is famously indiscreet – and it
is there forever.”
Staff need to automatically do a safety checklist before they post comments, to make sure that they are representative of the brand, adds Hales. “If staff are more conscious of the brand, there is less likelihood of it being misrepresented by people inside that organisation.”
Domino’s Pizza learnt this lesson the hard way after two employees filmed a revolting video where they deliberately broke the hygiene standards in one of the stores’ kitchens. The video was uploaded on YouTube, received more than a million views before it was pulled down, and triggered a multimillion-dollar loss for the 50-year-old brand. Domino’s reacted quickly by creating its own Twitter account and posted an apology via YouTube featuring the company CEO.
Nick Giles, co-founder of PR consultancy Seven Hills, explains how this swift response stopped the backlash from spiralling out of control. “The company bared its soul via social media, and was terribly honest about what it was getting wrong. It was then explicit about what it was doing to make the situation better,” he says. “From a reputational point of view, it was clear that Domino’s was taking the incident seriously, and was seeking to redress some pretty terrible things.”
The Vodafone and Domino’s incidents show that it can often pay to act quickly and in a clear-cut way. Conversely though, it can sometimes pay not to leap in and react too defensively, says Debbie Weinstein, Unilever’s director of global media innovation. She believes that often the online community itself, by providing balanced opinions, can be effective in moderating minor online transgressions.
Working out whether to react or not is probably the most difficult decision for a marketer to make. The answer, according to a growing number of companies, is to have a dedicated crisis plan for incidents that develop through social media. Unilever, for example, has just created its own strategy and guidelines document for its employees to use when dealing with social media, incorporating suggested responses and processes for several theoretical situations.
Keep off the astroturf
Companies tempted by “astroturfing” – whereby staff or paid members of the public are used to post favourable comments about a brand while posing as disinterested consumers – can pay a hefty price. When Honda published photos of its new Crosstour model on Facebook, its page was flooded with negative comments about the vehicle. A Honda product manager, Eddie Okuba, posted positive comments without disclosing his role in the company. The social networkers quickly pounced on Okuba, directing viewers to his CV. Elsewhere, Belkin, a global manufacturer of computer hardware, was caught offering money to anybody who posted positive reviews of certain products.
“The risks are extraordinarily high if companies are found doing this because, fundamentally, they are found to be untrustworthy and it can take many years to crawl back from that reputation,” says John Noble, CIM member and director of British Brands Group. “Branding is about building long-term reputations, so doing anything that could be seen as underhand or misleading can be inordinately damaging.”
Social media offers brands unparalleled opportunities to engage existing and potential customers. But as with many great innovations, there are accompanying perils. “With social media, the control that brands once had has inevitably dissipated. That means brands have to recognise they are in a new era,” says Interbrand’s Hales. It is only by learning from the mistakes of the past and by careful thought that marketers can navigate their brands safely through the ever evolving obstacle course of social media.
What’s your plan for social media meltdown?
We asked marketing experts for their blueprints for survival
Justin Bullock,
PR and marketing manager,
The Bluebeards Revenge
Scenario – actual situation
After deciding to launch in the US, British shaving products company The Bluebeards Revenge (TBR) discovers a US shaving brand with a very similar name – The Bluebeards Original. This firm allows TBR to trade for a year at a royalty cost of 50p per product, but subsequently demands a larger payment than TBR can afford. The company decides to remove its products from the US market in preparation for a complete rebranding later in the year. This move is communicated to its US stockists, which post brief messages on their websites saying that TBR has been withdrawn from the US. Rumours then spread across social media that the brand is defunct because one of its ingredients has been banned.
Google Alerts provides valuable early warning
“This was a classic case of misinformation because we had no control over the message put out by the stockists. They just told customers that the brand was no longer available without adding the crucial information that we would be relaunching it later in the year. If we hadn’t acted quickly we could have lost a lot of customers.
“We had already thought ahead, because I had access to Google Alerts, which gives me constant access to how our brand is talked about on social media. This turned out to be valuable planning, because I was able to quickly pick up the rumours. A tweet just wouldn’t have given us enough room to explain, so we decided to upload a blog post on our site, explaining that we were relaunching the brand and quashing the rumours about the ingredient. This statement didn’t overtly refer to the stockists’ statements, as we obviously didn’t want to alienate them by saying they’d issued wrong information.
“We then tweeted a link to this post, as well as directly contacting many of our most loyal – and social media‑active – customers. We were careful to say how much we valued the US market, and how much positive feedback we’d had from customers.
“The great thing was that, through this episode, we discovered how many brand fans we do have. Wet shaving is very popular with American men, and there are quite a few dedicated shaving blogs, forums, and even a YouTube channel, in the US. Many of them mentioned our relaunch news, and seemed happy that we’d contacted them to let them know.
“Ultimately, we could have lost the goodwill of many loyal customers, some we didn’t even know we had, through this episode. Although it wasn’t a scenario that we’d specifically planned ahead for, we had at least had the foresight to get Google Alerts. This meant we were in a great position to identify our most influential social media advocates.”
Craig Mather,
social media manager, Powwownow
Scenario – actual situation
The company launches a marketing campaign to promote its free conference calling service. Under the strapline “Up for a three-way?” the campaign hires three celebrities – cricketer Phil Tufnell, comedian Patrick Monahan and model Jodie Marsh to attempt to break the world record for the longest-ever conference call. Over two days, the three celebrities sit on beds sited in the concourses of three London rail stations. Some members of the public are offended by the risqué nature of the campaign, and around 300 tweets with a negative tone appear within three hours.
Microsite diverts heat from Twitter
“We were aware when we created this campaign that it might invite some negative comment, so we had planned for this happening. We had set up a microsite and, once we saw all the negative messages, our CEO, Andrew Pearce, posted a tweet inviting Twitter users to post their views on the comment section of this site. This took them out of Twitter, to a platform where their views wouldn’t be retweeted.
“Many of the people objecting didn’t understand the nature of our product and how the ‘three-way’ phrase relates to it, so we were able to explain that. The key was keeping a neutral, not defensive, tone, which might have made them angrier. We thanked them for their interest in the campaign. Once people understood our campaign better, the negative messages stopped almost immediately.
“If you’re going out on a limb with marketing activity, especially where you are proactively involving social media, it’s essential to have a contingency plan. Even one message from an influential person on Twitter can have an impact.
“Thinking about future campaigns, it would be useful to have video messages prepared featuring our CEO talking about our intentions, that we could upload to YouTube if necessary. Video is a strong medium. We have prominent business people who are enthusiastic advocates of our products. Encouraging these fans to post on our behalf could also be useful.”
Debbie Weinstein, director of global media innovation, Unilever
Scenario – theoretical situation
Someone experiences a serious rash after using a Unilever skincare product and is admitted to hospital. They post a Facebook status update about the experience, causing other social media users to question the safety of the product.
Clear guidelines and Sysomos software
“In a company of our size, having a clear process for how we manage crises that appear on social media is important. Our new social media guidelines are there to help staff to know when different departments should become involved and how, if at all, they should intervene.
“In this crisis scenario, it is likely that our customer care people would first pick it up. They use Sysomos monitoring software, which can spot key combinations of words – perhaps the brand name and “hospital”. The priority would then be to establish an offline communication with the affected individual.
“Once we are being seen to address the problem, the rumours would be likely to peter out. While the customer care team explore the problem, we would watch and wait. If we found it necessary, we might bring in our technical team to establish whether we were facing a recall situation.
“If it did turn out to be that serious, external affairs would also be involved. They might also have been brought in sooner if we thought that the original source of the news was someone with influence in their community or someone already known to us.
“We make clear in our social media guidelines that although it can pay to act fast if you need to rebut a factual inaccuracy, for example, sometimes it can be worth letting the community itself moderate. However, any possible product problem is potentially high risk, so we’d definitely want to start a dialogue offline.”
The cost of social media disaster
A survey of IT professionals showed social media disasters can cost businesses £2.45m a year
Of the 1,225 respondents worldwide, 94% said they had suffered considerable loss at
the hands of “loose”
tweets and Facebook updates related to sensitive information
The survey found that the top three
social media incidents included:
to magazine
