Author: Jim

I love these tweets. They’re like watching a train wreck. You know it’s coming, you know it’s gonna be bad, but in the end you have to watch. And usually, the damage is as catastrophic as you imagined it would be.

This particular example is one that I relish because it highlights an aspect of social media use that NONE of us have dealt with in the past. There is no precedent for it.

There’s an old saying among press and public information officers (though politicians are usually the ones that bump up against it the most), that goes:

Never argue with a man that buys ink by the barrel.

Basically, if you’ve got beef with someone who has a readership in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, don’t pick a fight. Why? Because all of those readers will only hear their side of the story, not yours.

But that’s not as true anymore. These days people who buy ink by the barrel tend to have lots of barrels of ink sitting around. People like Greg Sandoval have more than 8,000 followers. And a potential audience (through retweets and the like) of millions. And imagine the day that someone like Dr. Sanjay Gupta (1.5 million followers) decides he’s had enough and burns that bridge? I think at that point, the “don’t argue” bit actually applies to Dr. Gupta and not his employer.

Social media has twisted the calculus of crisis communications all around. I can think of any number of settings where we’d bump into this problem. A mayor deposed. A health care provider vs. the public health community. A sports star vs. his team. A victim vs. the media.

We no longer have that veil of authority anymore, especially in contentious situations. Because the person you’ll be fighting against is already building their following. What are you doing?

I’ve found there is a perception that social media problems are potential career-enders. Agency heads worry that if you mess up on social media, that’s it, you can never recover. This leads to a reluctance to take chances and experiment. And given some of the horror stories out there, that’s not that an unreasonable assumption. The best example of an Internet brouhaha I’ve seen is the GAP logo redesign disaster. Why expose yourself to second-guessing or increased unwelcome attention from the crowd?

The thing is, that perception isn’t exactly true anymore. It may have been when there weren’t any rules or best practices out of there, but today, it’s just flat out not true. There have been some great examples this year of social media disasters averted, come back from, and avoided. And this is our fourth lesson learned: social media disasters aren’t the career-enders that they’ve been in the past. It’s not easy by any means, and it still might not work, but the worst can be avoided.

Let’s list some of the biggest social media blunders this past year, and think how much they’ve changed your relationship with these companies: McDonald’s #McDStories, the NRA and CelebBoutique’s post-Aurora tweets, StubHub’s Friday afternoon f-bomb, the KitchenAid Obama debate tweet?

Anything? I’m sure, if you work in crisis communications, you’ve read case stories about it, but what did they really change? I’m willing to bet not much.

There are two reasons why, I think. First, by and large, social media disasters are usually tempests in a teapot. Take a look at the GAP logo kerfluffle. The company proposed to update their logo, and released it online. The outcry was overwhelming, online. GAP quickly walked it back and shelved the idea. Afterwards, GAP did some customer research on the issue and found that most GAP customers (y’know, the people that actually shop at GAP) had never even heard of the dust-up and liked the new logo. Gerald Baron even posted on it this past year.

The second reason why is because we’ve gotten better at how do manage these situations. We, as crisis communicators, have finally figured out that social media is just another tool and our tried and true methods of a managing crisis still work. Take, for example, the KitchenAid disaster from the second Presidential debate.

Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’. #nbcpolitics

So, yeah, how would that play on your agency’s account? I’m guessing not so well. And yet, KitchenAid still exists as a part of the Whirlpool mega-company. They still use Twitter. (More times per day than your agency, by the way.) How is this possible? It’s easy, they took care of the problem right away and engaged in positive, aggressive crisis communications.

Just minutes after the offensive tweet, it was deleted (hooray for media monitoring!) and an sincere apology was posted to both Facebook and Twitter by the Senior Director of KitchenAid Brand and Marketing Shared Services for Whirlpool, Cynthia Soledad (hooray for empathy, management engagement and quick turnarounds!). Ms. Soledad then spent the rest of the night responding, via Twitter, to what seemed like everyone who posted a cross word about their offensive tweet. She proactively reached out to dozens of news agencies, again via Twitter, offering the opportunity for direct and immediate response and follow-up (hooray for availability and assisting the media!). I watched, she was on there until after midnight, and that didn’t include any off-line conversations, phone calls or emails.

Let’s review what I would call a worst-case scenario. Event happens, immediate and overwhelming response, situation goes away, company/brand/agency lives on. I definitely think there’s a lesson to be learned there.

The third lesson we’ve learned this year is a new one, and one I wouldn’t have guessed six months ago. One that many folks, when writing their crisis communications plans six months ago wouldn’t have guessed. It was the demise of Facebook as a crisis messaging tool. Yep, demise, I said it.

(That doesn’t mean Facebook is useless in a crisis–in fact, there are situations and topics where Facebook is still the very best method of communications. But today I’m talking about using it as a crisis messaging service, which is important because Facebook is written into so many crisis plans to be used in just that way.)

It took a number of years, a lifetime in social media, for Facebook to start offering useful Pages for non-person entities like businesses and non-profits to stake a claim on the social network. And it took a few more years for the General Services Administration to negotiate Terms of Service with the social networking giant, signaling that it was “okay” for government to put a toe into the virtual world. A couple of years, and one IPO, later, we have government agency Pages littering the Facebook landscape. (And given how underutilized some of them are, littered is the correct word.)

And then, this fall, something changed. An algorithm, to be specific. (For folks who said that geeks would never rule the world…)

The specific algorithm is the EdgeRank one, which determines how many people see a particular Page’s posts. The idea is that the more interaction one’s Page has, the more likely it will be that Page’s posts will be seen by it’s followers. You used to post something and about forty percent of your followers would see it in their feed. Today, the number is between ten and fifteen percent. (So when you proudly tell your executive that your agency has just reached 100 followers, no more than fifteen people are seeing your posts organically.) Coincidentally, this change happened around the same time that Facebook started offering Pages the ability to increase the EdgeRank of their posts, for a fee.

And people revolted.

Of course, just days later, Superstorm Sandy hit and government agencies all over the Mid-Atlantic used their new social media plans to post to Facebook, only to see the effects blunted by this new algorithm change.

For years, social media acolytes have pitched using social media as a way to get direct, opt-in only, agency-to-person messaging utilizing other people’s distribution networks (read: free), around the media filter. And for the most part, that pitch has been successful (because it was right).

But now? I can’t promise that anymore. I can only promise that some tiny percentage of the people who have signed up to see what you’re posting will see it. Any fantasies you had about posting a boil water advisory on your Page and having 10,000 people in your county see and share it are gone.

And besides all that, just listening to some of the money-making ideas coming out of Menlo Park, one has to wonder how much longer government will tolerate plying along. From the Instagram Terms of Service debacle to allowing access to people’s Messenger for a dollar per spam message, well, one has to wonder how much longer we can consider it a prime messaging network.