MackCollier.com

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Three steps to saving your company from a social media firestorm!

Last week I was contacted by a company that found itself in an unfortunate position.  One of the products it produces had been failing, and bloggers were taking to the internet to voice their displeasure.  The end result was that if you Googled the company and its product, the majority of the top results were, you guessed it, from angry bloggers.

So what happens if your company finds itself in a similar situation with customers running with pitchforks in hand to their blogs and Twitter to rake your company over the coals?  What’s your plan of action?  Here’s the advice I gave them for correcting this issue, and how your company can handle a similar crisis in three steps:

1 – Fix the problem.  No amount of social media or ANY other type of on or offline communications will help you until your company FIRST fixes the problem.  If you have a defective product, or shoddy customer service, or whatever, you have to first address the ROOT CAUSE of the customer complaints.  And once you have a solution in place for the problem….

2 – Actively respond to customers via social media.  Find the customers that are blogging and twittering and Facebooking their displeasure over your company, and let them know that first, you hear them and thank them for their feedback.  Second, that you apologize.  Third, that you have a PLAN IN PLACE to fix the problem.  Fourth, that you’re here and listening, and invite further feedback from them, and give them a way to get in touch with you.

Last week when Graco announced a recall to one of its strollers, the company turned to Twitter to interact with customers and get them information about which strollers were and were not affected by the recall.  Timely communication such as this also helps stunt the spread of rumors and misinformation, which only makes the company’s crisis management efforts twice as hard.  Additionally, customers loved how Graco was proactive in reaching out to them, and a potentially negative situation for the company became a positive one.

Customers want to know that you hear them, and what you are going to do to correct the problem.  If you can show them that you are listening, that you are taking their criticism to heart and ACTING on it, then that criticism will slowly turn into positive evangelism for your company.  That means those existing negative Google results for your company and product will begin to turn positive.

3 – Start getting correct information out via social media channels.  But your company still needs to ‘tell its story’.  Many people will be doing research on Google for your product before they buy, so you need to make sure they see the correct information about your product and company.  If you have a blog, this is where you can let customers know what you are doing to address the situation, and how you are correcting the problem.  If you aren’t currently blogging, this is a great excuse for starting one.  Dell’s company blog had barely been in place for a week in 2006 when the ‘exploding laptop’ issue ‘blew up’.  But having the blog in place gave Lionel and the rest of Dell’s blogging team a channel to get relevant and accurate information out about the situation, and what Dell was doing to correct it.

So there’s a simple 3-point plan for avoiding a social media firestorm; Fix the problem, Respond to customers letting them know you have fixed the problem, Get the word out via your OWN social media channels that you have fixed the problem.  But again, the starting point is to fix the problem.  If you think that you ignore the core issue and just use social media to ‘push down’ negative Google results, you are setting yourself up for failure.

The only thing worse than a company that doesn’t respond during a crisis is one that DOES respond, yet still doesn’t fix the problem.

Pic via Flickr user chaosinjune

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What #blogchat can teach you about building a successful community site

About 10 months ago on a Sunday nite I asked a blogging question on Twitter, and as a bit of an experiment (and to better organize the responses I was hoping to get) I added the #blogchat hashtag to my question.  With that, the first #blogchat was born.

Since that time, we’ve had #blogchat every Sunday nite at 8pm Central time, with the exception of Mother’s Day last year.  It has gone from a couple of dozen participants leaving 200-300 tweets during the first one, to now every #blogchat attracts well over 100 participants and over 1,000 tweets.  Or a new tweet every 5 or 6 seconds.

And I think a lot of what makes #blogchat a hit can also help your company with its community-building efforts.  Here’s some examples:

1 – A community forms when people have a sense of ownership in something larger than themselves.  This is a key to #blogchat’s success.  From the get-go, I’ve made sure that everyone understands that #blogchat isn’t MY chat, it’s OUR chat.  In fact, if you’ve participated in #blogchat, you’ve probably noticed that after the first hour or so, I generally stop tweeting.  This is because I don’t want to dominate #blogchat, and I’ve learned that it’s best to bring smart people together, give them the stage, then get out of the way.  I think this is why people enjoy #blogchat, because they know that they can easily join in and play a role in the conversation that develops.  That’s very powerful, and it’s a big reason why #blogchat is so successful.

2 – Consider the type of actions you want to encourage when you create your community site.  From the get-go, I wanted everyone to feel like they could join in and participate in #blogchat.  As a result, the format of the chat is very loose compared to many other chats.  Whereas many chats have structured points/questions that are addressed every 15 mins or so, #blogchat starts with a general topic that everyone runs with.  As a result, I think #blogchat has more of a ‘coffee house’ feel to it, where everyone is talking about the same broad topic, but each table is discussing a slight variation on the main theme.  So the bar for joining #blogchat has been lowered, and that leads, I think, to more participation and interaction.

3 – Encourage lurkers to participate.  I’ll be honest, when a #blogchat really gets rolling, it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed as 20-30 new tweets come in every couple of minutes.  I can’t always reply to every #blogchat tweet that I want to, but you better believe that if I see someone tweet that it’s their first #blogchat, they’ll get a reply from me!  I will quickly thank them for joining, and encourage them to join in.  Also, before every #blogchat, I will tweet a reminder that #blogchat is open to EVERYONE and that we are ALL coming together to learn from each other.  This simply plays into the idea that the more smart people you get participating, the better and more valuable the conversations will be.  Which increases the value of #blogchat for everyone.

The same applies to your community site, if people are lurking, that means they are somewhat interested, but they don’t have that spark to move from lurking to participating.  A great way to encourage this switch is to lower the bar for their participation.

4 – Crowdsource ideas for community improvement from the community.  I’ll be honest, often I am so busy with client work that I really can’t spend as much time on developing new topics for each week’s #blogchat as I would like.  So what I will often do is reach out to #blogchatters and ask them what topics they want to see covered!  This helps me by setting the topic for the chat, but it’s also empowering to participants, because it shows them that they have control over the direction that #blogchat takes.

One week a couple of months ago I was totally swamped with work and didn’t even have time to make #blogchat.  But I definitely did NOT want to cancel #blogchat for that week because I was afraid that I would be disappointing a lot of people.  So I decided to take a risk, and made that particular #blogchat ‘open mic’, meaning there was no set topic, and everyone could talk about whatever they liked.  Somewhat to my surprise, the open mic format was a big hit, and many #blogchatters said they wanted it to be a regular occurance (but not EVERY week, they clarified).  So listening to their feedback, I changed the schedule so that the last Sun nite of every month is now open mic.  And this ties back to the first point of giving participants a sense of ownership in the community that’s being created!

5 – Know your limitations and work around them.  As I started crowdsourcing ideas for #blogchat topics, I ran into a bit of a problem.  #blogchat users were asking to discuss some topics that I really wasn’t the best person to lead a discussion on.  One example was many #blogchatters wanted to talk about improving your blog’s SEO efforts.  So that gave me the idea of bringing in experts to co-host certain #blogchat topics.  For example, @leeodden co-hosted the #blogchat about maximizing your blog’s SEO efforts, The Red Cross’ @wharman schooled us on how nonprofits can utilize social media, and @amyafrica told us how you could generate sales for your company via your blog.

Bringing in these experts not only addressed a shortcoming of #blogchat, but in the process it gave these experts the incentive to promote their involvement with #blogchat to their own networks.  So the quality of the content created at #blogchat was improved, and the  reach of #blogchat was expanded as well!  Not a bad way to turn a minus into a plus, eh?

6 – Realize that not everything is perfect.  Even though #blogchat is a very popular chat, not everything goes well and some people are critical of the chat.  Some people don’t like certain topics.  And while some people think it’s thrilling how fast-paced #blogchat can be, it simply overwhelms some people.

But this feedback is valuable, because it lets me know what’s working, and potentially what isn’t working.  And you have to dig for that criticism, too.  I’ve learned that if someone wants to complain about #blogchat, they are more likely NOT to do it in a reply to me.  So I have to constantly monitor the #blogchat stream for that feedback.

And at the same time, I have to weigh that feedback against what everyone is saying.  For example, last week the topic of #blogchat was dealing with how social media consultants should use social media themselves.  Some people publicly voiced their displeasure that they didn’t think the topic was blog-centric.  But at the same time, people were sending me DMs as well as publicly saying that they enjoyed the change of pace and appreciated a broader topic.

So as with all aspects of social media, don’t fear or run from criticism.  It’s valuable feedback that can help you improve your efforts!

7 – Be grateful.  I am honestly humbled and eternally grateful that people enjoy reading and participating in #blogchat.  I make sure that everyone understands that THEY are just as responsible for the success of #blogchat as I  am, and this goes back to sharing ownership of a created community.  No one creates a community by themselves, and communities usually aren’t driven by people that focus inward instead of outward.  Yes, saying ‘Thank You!’ still matters.

So these are some reasons why I think #blogchat is working, and I think that each of these examples can help you improve your own community-building efforts!

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Creating a Social Media Strategy (But Were Afraid to Ask)

RSSWorldIf your company is using social media, it is VITAL that you have a strategy and plan in place that’s guiding your efforts.  Not only will your efforts be much more successful, but it will save you a ton of time and money since your efforts will be focused.  And it will be much easier to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

So why don’t more people have a social media strategy in place? In most cases, they simply aren’t sure how to create said strategy.  This post will hopefully help with this ALL too common problem.  So if your company is using social media and ‘winging it’ without a plan, please share this post internally.  If you have friends that are trying to get social media efforts off the ground at their company, please pass this along to them.  We will not see REAL growth from companies using social media until more of them get SOLID plans in place that are guiding their efforts.

Let’s get started on making that happen.  Here is a framework for creating a social media strategy for your business.

First, think about what you are wanting to accomplish with social media.  What are your goals?  Here’s some examples:

  • Build awareness for your company
  • Increase sales
  • Increase customer leads
  • Establish thought leadership
  • Use social media as a customer service platform
  • Provide product support for customers
  • Collect feedback on existing or potential products and services
  • Build a place where customer evangelists can connect

Second, think about who you are wanting to reach.  Is it current customers?  Potential customers?  Industry sources?  Potential clients?  Who is your ‘target market’?  Creating a simple monitoring system will help you determine the answer to this question.  By monitoring online mentions, you can get a good feel for where the online conversation about your company is happening, and how active it is.  Want to jump on Twitter?  What if no one on Twitter is talking about you?  Monitoring will help you determine this.  You can use premium tools such as Radian6 or Techrigy, or if you are a smaller business it’s probably fine to go with free tools such as Google Alerts and Twitter search.

Third, what are your resources?  What’s your budget for social media?  How many employees are available to work on your social media efforts?  Will you have to outsource some of your efforts at the start?  Will you have to outsource all of your efforts at the start?  How much time can you devote to social media?

Answering these questions will greatly determine which tactics (blogs, Twitter, Facebook) are best for helping you achieve your social media strategy.  Let me state this again; Getting on Twitter is NOT a social media strategy.  Twitter is a tactic used to execute a social media strategy.  You first need to answer the three questions above and THEN decide that Twitter is the right (or one of the right) tactics to help you achieve your goal(s) for social media.

So let’s say you’ve answered these three questions.  Your goals are to use social media to build awareness and increase sales.  That means you will primarily be targeting new and potential customers.  Now let’s also factor in the answers from the third question about your resources.

On the surface, a goal of using social media as a way to build awareness for your business and increase sales sounds like a great opportunity for your business to launch a company blog.  But a blog carries with it unique time and social media skillset requirements.  That’s why you also need to factor in your resources.  Do you have enough time and people available  to ensure that the blog will regularly have fresh content available?  Do you also have the people available to spend time connecting with readers and potential customers on and off your blog?  If not, do you have the budget to outsource some or all of these efforts?

That’s why you must consider all three questions at once.  And after you have answered these questions and now have your strategy in place, and have decided on the social media tactics you will use, now you have to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.  At this point, don’t blindly assume that more traffic or followers or friends is best.  Make sure that the metrics you measure tie back to your social media goals.  If your end goal for your blog is to sell more widgets, should you measure number of comments per post, or number of referrals from the blog to the widget product page on your website?  Does it really matter that you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, if only 10 of them are potential customers?

Put your metrics on trial.  Make SURE that whatever you measure makes sense in the context of what you are trying to accomplish with social media.  More traffic is great, but what actions are those visitors performing once they arrive at your blog or message board?  If you are adding 100 fans a week to your Facebook page and still can attribute no additional sales from Facebook fans, so what?  (BTW this opens another can of worms, but it could be that your Facebook fans ARE driving sales, but you don’t know that because you aren’t tracking them correctly, or at all)

At the end of the day, you have to have a strategy guiding your social media efforts.  And I know that some CEOs hear the term ‘social media strategy’ and immediately get nervous because they think it means a lot of $$$ and a big commitment.  What it means that you are going to ORGANIZE your social media efforts and make them more efficient.  Just because an intern got you on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t mean you need to be on either site.

Once you get a strategy in place, you’ll save time and money.  You have a strategy driving your other marketing efforts, why should what you are doing with social media be any different?

Thanks to Esther for suggesting this post!

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Welcome!

Thanks for stopping by, let me give you a quick run-down of what you will find on this site. The information here is divided into three areas:

1 – My blog and social media consulting services. Click here if you want to learn more about my blog consulting services, or here if you want to learn more about my social media consulting services, or here if you would like to learn more about where I will be speaking, or how to hire me to speak at your event. Each page also has my prices for these services, and please email me if you’d like a custom quote, or want to discuss your particular needs. And don’t hesitate to email me if you have a general question.

2 -Social Media Library.  Here you’ll find some of the best posts I’ve written on social media over the last 4 years.  These were written as instructional posts to help you with your social media efforts, and are organized according to the following subjects: Blogging 101, Social Media Case Studies, Social Media Monitoring, and Twitter 101.  I’ll be updating these sections often, so please check back!

Thanks for stopping by!