Simon Lilly's Blog

10 Ways to Deal With a Social Media Explosion

// March 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

What is the best way of preparing or repairing your brands reputation when big news breaks online? From a secretive new Apple product launch to a damning piece of negative press, once it appears online, its only a matter of time before the waves start to hit the social media shores.

I’ve taken 10 key learnings from a number explosions that I’ve observed and been involved in over the past few months and wanted to share them with you.

1. Predict

If at all possible, thorough preparation for a big online news event can be priceless. Creating a set of frequently asked questions can be a extremely valuable resource when composing blog comments, Facebook replies or Twitter tweets. If you have the luxury of a PR team then these guys can be invaluable at helping prepare.

2. Prepare

Can your blog cope with a traffic spike or do you need to use a plug-in like WordPress’s Super Cache to take the strain? If you have a good relationship with your host, let them know before that traffic is coming so that they can have support available if your hosting does start to slow down.

3. Plan

Big announcements usually have a time that they go live. Make sure that everything you need to be is in place before the event. This allows you to totally focus on dealing with the positive feedback and/or negative fallout that the announcement may bring.

4. Filter

If you are expecting feedback from your announcement/release then carefully prepare your feedback channels. Make sure comments are enabled on blog posts, create a Facebook Note that all of your comments can accumulate in and consider setting up a dedicated e-mail address for feedback to be sent to. Setting the channels up effectively means you have less places to monitor and messages can be communicated quickly across fewer places.

5. Observe

You don’t always need to rush in and react to the fallout from an announcement. More often than not there will be positive and negative messages – look for trends and themes, especially in the negative comments.This will help when composing replies.

6. Respond

Preparing a reponse that answers a number of concerns is more efficient that addressing each one seperately. That said, your reply strategy should be dictated by the volume of responses, ideally you would reply to each and every piece of feedback individually, but sometimes that just is not possible.

7. Trust

This one involves a leap of faith that some people may not be willing to take. If you are confident in your brand (and your customers) then have faith that the loyal and passionate customers will see the positive side and hopefully they will make up a large volume of the social media buzz.

8. Listen

Even if you aren’t planning to respond to tweets on Twitter, still listen to what people are saying. You might find it useful for coming up with answers or even predicting the questions that haven’t been asked in other channels.

9. Rotate

Dealing with an onslaught of feedback via Twitter, Facebook, the Blog is tough going. Creating unique, well crafted responses quickly and efficiently is time consuming and mentally tiring. Make sure you have more than one person fire-fighting otherwise the quality of responses may drop over time.

10. Evaluate

Don’t wait until the explosion has passed before you begin to evaluate. Keep notes of lessons learnt during quiet periods. There can be a huge amount of activity in a short period of time and this stop-start nature will mean that recalling all the occurrences in detail will be challenging.

Now you know what to do, find out what not to do…

5 Things to Avoid During a Social Media Explosion

// March 27th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // social media, web thoughts

The spotlight turned back on to social media management recently following the way that Nestle handled the ‘social media explosion’ that occurred on their Facebook Page. Greenpeace created a video about Nestle’s use of palm oil in Kit Kat’s and how it directly endangered the lives of orangutans. This video quickly went viral after it was removed from YouTube and the main focal point for the public’s rage was the Nestle Facebook Page.

Below are 5 things to avoid doing when the going gets tough.

1. Moderation

Don’t delete peoples comments, unless they are totally irrelevant or break the terms of use of the environment you are in. On Facebook there is a Report function that might be advisable to call upon rather than deleting a comment. The removal of comments is both frustrating (for posters) and confusing (for readers).

2. Composure

Remain calm and collected, don’t rise to any comments that are obviously posted to generate a reaction. Never reply in anger.

3. Change

Resist the urge to edit or tweak your original statement, treat a post in social media like you would a blog and use strike-throughs and updates to modify a message.

4. Haste

The immediate reaction to a social media onslaught on your Facebook Page or Blog is to quickly reply to each comment or query. The danger here is that the quality of your message will be effected. Slow down and where possible compose responses that meet the needs of a number of commenter’s into a single reply.

5. Abandon Ship

I’ve seen on more than one occasion a brand’s Facebook Page that has been abandoned after an explosion. If the situation is not managed well the community of ‘fans’ that remain may be very jaded and any communication that the brand communicates might be met with negativity. The only way to resolve this would be to back track and clearly address the root cause of the original problem and hopefully move forward from there.

I hope you’ve found these 5 pieces of advice useful and it would be great to have any additional words of wisdom added in the comments below…