A client of mine recently copied me on a note to a marketing person she works with. It highlighted a piece she apparently liked about social media written by a professional speaker. The gist of this piece was exposing the “good, the bad and the ugly” of social media. The good was limited to one sentence that spoke to convenience and visibility. The rest got uglier and uglier, bringing up incidents prominently played in the media, and ending with “the really UGLY”: the fear of giving the public an opportunity to voice their opinions because, well, they’ll do so. And they”ll do it in unimaginably awful ways. Take cover everyone! The sky is falling!
To be honest, it didn’t really make sense since this piece ended with a reference to President Obama’s comment on the Cambridge Police Department incident with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the necessity of “thinking before you speak.” How this related to Twitter I don’t know, but, clearly, the idea is that a little social media can be a dangerous thing.
I immediately sent my client a note saying I thought this piece was all wrong. You can find issues and potential disasters with any communications program and platform, but that, as she was learning with what we’re doing, a well-managed program can offer tremendous benefits.
But, it is certainly worth acknowledging that open communications (as in freedom of speech) can lead to communications you may not want to hear. There are risks that people will take the opportunity to publicly slam your business and do it in a way that becomes viral. That can be scary but it’s no reason to eschew social media. It just means you have to implement strategies to address potential public complaints and also turn them into a learning opportunity for your business.
I asked my friend and social media maven Julie Wright of WrightOn Communications what the best practices might be for dealing with what she refers to as “social muckrakers” and, of course, I got a wonderfully insightful and concise response:
“The first rule is to engage them if they’re going to talk about you anyhow. Companies need to be part of the conversation to shape it.
“As for social muckrakers, the options are 1) to have your facts ready and call them out, and 2) address their content and message. Don’t get personal.”
Julie would also build an off-line coalition of supporters and then call on them to tweet, blog, or post responses on Facebook to marginalize the maligner’s damage.
But, she reasonably points out, the real concern for a company should be if the jabs or complaints on Twitter (or other social media platforms) are valid. “If so,,” she says, “it’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and improve!”
The point, of course, is not to follow the lead of, say, the Marines and the NFL, and ban social media, but to develop guidelines and best practices so you can take advantage of the many benefits social media offers and have a plan in place in case a social maligner strikes.
September 8th, 2009 - 2:24 pm
I followed you until the last sentence. Both the Marines and the NFL have legitimate enterprise needs to control communication. Something that can easily be done with email because it passes through a corporate server, but the same is not true for most social media because it is owned by a third party.
If your business currently monitors email for trade secrets or other corporate concerns, how will it do the same with social media?
September 8th, 2009 - 4:56 pm
I understand the security risks. The problem is that the policies are inconsistent. For instance, I believe the Marines ban the individual use of social networks on military networks but not from personal computers. Family members may access social networking, too. So, they can’t control what happens on another network. Interestingly, they obviously see that it has some value. They have an official Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitter account. There was an interesting story on this last month in PCWorld (http://www.pcworld.com/article/169628/marines_uphold_ban_on_social_networks.html).
With the NFL, it’s a control issue, but it seems that they could also benefit from the interchange with fans. To my mind, it’s a matter of creating guidelines for players and others to follow, not a call for a wholesale ban.
To some extent, with any organization, there are risks that proprietary information can be leaked, but that isn’t limited to social media usage. That’s a deeper institutional issue that must be addressed for all communications.