In a previous post, 6 Basic Manners that Matter in Social, we outlined a few basic rules of social engagement for small businesses. At that time, eight out of 10 SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) used social to drive business growth. In 2015, 90 percent will rely upon social media marketing services to find, target and communicate with customers online. Subsequently, you may want to add a few more manners and best practices to your social media policy manual. In Common Social Media Etiquette for Businesses, an article featured on the Hootsuite blog (full disclosure, LGK is a Hootsuite client), writer Olsa Sorkina lists nine essential rules:
- Always keep your target audience in mind
- Avoid automatic messaging
- Respond to comments, fast
- Don’t badmouth your competition
- Maximize the shareability of your social messaging
- Tame your hashtags
- Keep your brand accounts professional, and your personal accounts separate
- Don’t spam your followers’ feeds
- Don’t follow for numbers
To underscore the importance of manners and their influence upon business reputation, just google Amy’s Baking Company of Scottsdale, AZ and you’ll find one of the most memorable small business social media disasters. Two years ago, the restaurant was featured on the Fox Network television show, Kitchen Nightmares. The restaurant owners’ on-camera actions and subsequent social media reactions combine for more than reality TV fodder. In the event you missed the episode, here’s a recap and a piece of sound advice from The National Law Review.
The restaurant received an extremely unflattering portrayal on a reality show meant to highlight ways in which restaurants in trouble could turn their fortunes around. After the episode aired, viewers incensed at what they had seen (as well as regular trolls looking to create chaos) began to post negative comments on the restaurant’s Facebook page. At this point, rather than weather the storm brought about by what was probably a bad decision to appear on a reality show, someone began responding to the critics on Facebook in a series of all-caps rants. The couple who ran the restaurant claimed the page was hacked, but subsequent posts by the couple didn’t differ substantially in content or tone, lambasting the critics and stoking the fires of the online controversy. Until that point, it was likely that the only people aware of the restaurant on a large scale were viewers of the show. In response the couple’s reaction, however, negative posts began to spread virally from Facebook to Twitter to Yelp to attack the restaurant from every conceivable online corner. Reddit comment threads on the subject surged, and the visibility of the dispute reached every news aggregator on the internet. A series of off-the-cuff responses made out of anger turned what was likely a short-lived black spot on their reputation into a full-blown national online media spectacle, with coverage of the behavior in multiple media outlets.
Social media and online forums are areas where reputations can be forged or broken before anyone knows what happened. The mentality of “fight fire with fire” is outdated in the new digital landscape, and maintaining control of the message in this environment relies heavily on anticipation, moderation and consistency. Before you fire off that angry response, take a step back and consider how you can best serve your organization, then plan a response that achieves your goals, rather than satisfies your ire.
As of this writing, Amy’s Baking Company is still in business and appears to have weathered the social storm with a kinder and gentler approach to community engagement.
What other manners and best practices would you add to this list? Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section of this post.
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Stat sources used in this post:
MarketingTechBlog.com
CustomerThink.com