MarCom Professional

When Social Media Backfires

People don’t like it when they feel they’ve been tricked, cheated or treated badly; the same applies to how people engage with brands. Whereas in the past, companies could choose to ignore letters and phone calls, now people with an axe to grind can make themselves heard. If they find other people online with similar grievances, brands can find themselves confronted with an army of angry customers. As the popular blogger Jeff Jarvis put it, “Now consumers do not just consume. We spit back. We have our own printing presses.”

In fact, failing to respond to criticism in social media can cause severe damage to a company’s reputation. Here are a few examples of what can happen when a brand’s involvement with social media backfires and what you can learn about running a word of mouth campaign:

Dominos

Earlier this year, two Dominos employees thought it wise to post a video on YouTube of them playing with customers’ food. A few million hits later and their employers failed to see the funny side. Dominos posted an apology on YouTube and starting Tweeting to try and limit the damage. However, they have still been criticised for being slow to respond, instead hoping the fuss would die down on its own.

Lesson: You can’t bury your head in the sand if you don’t want to listen to what people are saying about you. Criticism will simply go unchallenged if you don’t use social media tools to respond to it.

Squarespace

Last month, this web design software company ran a competition to win the latest 3GS iPhone in exchange for Tweeting the company name. Whilst the campaign attracted over 36,000 followers and 95,000 Tweets, some have complained at the amount of irrelevant messages and that the giveaway was actually a gift voucher, rather than for an actual iPhone.

Lesson: You should tread carefully when using Twitter. The success of your word of mouth campaign could be short lived if it annoys people with irrelevant, inauthentic messages they don’t want to receive.

Habitat

This minimalist style furniture chain should have applied the same approach to their marketing after they thought it wise to send out promotional Tweets featuring popular search terms such as Iran, Apple and iPhone to lure people to their tweets. With time and attention being so tightly guarded these days, the Twitter flock were none too pleased about Habitat’s blatant spamming. Habitat has since apologised (but not on Twitter, surprisingly).

Lesson: This is a perfect example of a brand jumping into social media without first taking swimming lessons. They didn’t understand how you should engage with people on social media. The internet isn’t the same as TV. You can’t just broadcast irrelevant messages at people and expect them to listen.

Ryanair

When a freelance developer blogged about usability problems on the Ryanair website he might have expected a polite message from Ryanair saying they’d look into it or to point out his inaccuracies. What he wouldn’t have expected was to receive anonymous, insulting messages from Ryanair’s staff (their ip address was tracked to Ryanair HQ).  This unfortunate, and easily avoided, incident made Ryanair look unprofessional and that it had little respect for its customers.

Lesson: Once you've published content in the social media world, it's out there for good. So you should apply the same common sense and company policy to responding to criticism in social media as you would to customer emails or to journalists in the traditional media.