Last week was Digital Capital Week here in Washington, DC. The event consisted of workshops, meet-ups, parties and other events. It was well attended and well tweeted. As is now the custom, event attendees tweet out the little nuggets of shareable information followed by a hashtag, thus sharing with their following and publicizing the event.
Here are some that I saw:
“Be authentic.”
“Search your name on YouTube to see if there is any videos of you that you’ve forgotten.”
“Engage with your followers.”
“Blogging is hard work.”
My reaction to these on my Twitter stream: Really? Is that so? I have never heard that before.
On my Google Reader this morning, I came across this piece from HubSpot: “Responding to a Social Media Crisis: #Intuit Outage Takeaways.” Here are its four rules for dealing with such a crisis:
1. Practice what you preach. If you tout the importance of transparency, then make sure that you can be transparent during a crisis, too. For example, at HubSpot, we use trust.hubspot.com to show our portals and report on downtimes.
2. Respond fast, respond often. You’re only hurting yourself if you wait too long before releasing information, and when you finally do speak up there isn’t a lot of substance to what you’re saying. Give frequent updates, even if the update is just “no new information”.
3. Apologize for the right thing. Make sure you aren’t alienating your customers further with your apology. They may be more upset if they feel like you are not addressing how the error impacted their livelihood.
4) Make amends. Try to find a way you can make it up to your customers. They are the backbone of your business, so it’s in your best interest to keep them happy.
About Deborah Brody
Deborah Brody writes and edits anything related to marketing communications. Most blog posts are written under the influence of caffeine.
Nice comments. I guess I would add that from my experience more people need a reminder of the basics of marketing and communications than most people think. And also that while social media does not change the basics, it does change the speed and importance of reacting because consumers have so much more power and information travels very quickly.
Thanks for your comment Mike. Definitely more people need to learn marcomm basics! And you are right that social media makes the interactions even quicker. What I was getting at is that we hear a lot of recycled advice being passed off as “social media expertise” when in fact it is a page from Marketing/Communications 101.