How do firms stay afloat when disaster strikes and the story takes on a life of its own in cyberspace? MARIE BORANreports
WITHIN SECONDS of the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill, visitors to Facebook, those idly checking online news, and strolling smartphone users casually perusing Twitter were able to get a picture of the events unfolding.
“You can rest assured that I will walk before I would ever buy a gallon of your gasoline,” said one Twitter user, while the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, used the microblogging platform to air her views that the company “must not be let off the hook”.
Independent online community Socialmediatoday.com analysed blog posts around the time of the spillage and found that 64 per cent of those mentioning BP were negative in tone while 23,212 tweets mentioning “BP” and “oil spill” got 49.5 million Twitter impressions.
This is what happens when social media pick up on a news story. It’s not rocket science. In fact, your mother would put it this way: bad news travels fast.
“Social media creates a whole new set of challenges for people and businesses that need to manage their reputation,” says Tom Murphy, Microsoft’s director of corporate communications, corporate citizenship and community affairs.
Murphy will be speaking on the topic on April 14th at the Public Relations Institute of Ireland’s annual conference.
The well-established principles in the PR world around managing an issue, he says, are well understood and still relevant. What has changed is that companies must use social media tools as part of the process.
“Before, it would have been about a press conference, press release and maybe some face-to-face meetings, but that’s no longer enough. Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media must be included in the process both in terms of how you prepare for any issue and address it once it happens,” says Murphy.
But “it’s not a standalone thing,” he insists. “When you’re talking about general business communication, you need integration.”
Why are organisations so wary of social media? It has disrupted the traditional news cycle whereby a TV station, newspaper or magazine broke stories. “Now everyone is effectively a publisher. The volume and variety of issues that are emerging through social media is just unheard of.”
A decade ago, if the PR division of a large fast-food franchise such as Domino’s sat down and thought about all possible worst-case scenarios, they would never have considered their employees doing unmentionable things in the preparation of customers’ food, videoing this and uploading it to YouTube, where it would be watched by hundreds of thousands around the world.
While organisations try to futureproof against the misuse of social media, volume is a big concern, ie the sheer number of people who will tweet and re-tweet something that might be important or trivial, truthful or erroneous.
“The trivial can become a really major incident. The noise something generates online can often be larger than is justified in the real world and the important thing to note is that people do use social media to track the news.”
Companies have to decide when to engage and when to hold off, because not every online comment addressing your firm is going to be constructive or without expletives and directionless rants. The internet troll of lore once lived on message boards and forums, jumping out to insult an unsuspecting visitor, but such visitors can now be found among innocent netizens on Twitter, Facebook and, in particular, YouTube.
“Many issues that companies spend time firefighting are self-inflicted; perhaps their employees did something wrong, in the case of Domino’s, or it could be a prominent individual, in the case of designer Kenneth Cole.”
Cole used a Twitter “hashtag” (a searchable label for following topics) that was tracking the Cairo uprising – but he did so to promote his spring collection: “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo,” he tweeted.
There is, of course, an upside to using social media to build your firm’s reputation. You just need to be prepared.
“It’s a very complex environment for someone working in communications, but the key thing is getting prepared ahead of time. If your customers are using social media, you need to be engaging with them – it needs to be integrated across PR, marketing, sales, customer services.
“Social media is not a strategy; it is a set of tools, and that is all. Because they are personal and social, there are different ways of using them than you would e-mail or advertising, but that is still all they are,” Murphy says.
The most successful social media campaigns are those integrated with traditional marketing. The “Old Spice guy” recently had the web a-chatter with his funny tweets and personalised YouTube videos that ran in conjunction with a heavy rotation of television advertisements in the US.
“It was incredibly funny and incredibly smart. It was a successful campaign for rebranding an old product, shifting units and changing customer perception – but at the time there was quite a noticeable faction declaring it a complete waste of money, that it hadn’t helped Old Spice at all.
“These people were proffering opinions without any knowledge of what the campaign objectives were, so it’s a good illustration of how people don’t let facts get in the way of their opinion.”
Social media can act as an early warning, Murphy explains. People get nervous about brand negativity, but researching what people are saying can give you a head-start on an issue coming down the line, and the twittering masses can be harnessed for the greater good.
At the time of the 2009 Fort Hood Army Post shootings in Texas, the local hospital needed blood, and tweeted a successful appeal. “Even in times of crisis, there are positives,” says Murphy.
