Social Media Crises: The Hidden Chatter
When we think of and mostly talk about, Social Media crises, we tend to look at the bigger stories; United Breaks Guitars, Motrin Moms, JetBlue. Let’s face it, they’re juicier and hit a broader audience. These stories bring together traditional and social media. But smaller, mostly “hidden” issues can create PR nightmares for a business.
As we experienced with a client today. For obvious reasons I can’t name them, I like having clients and don’t like making a painful issue worse. The issue didn’t get broadcast across Twitter or Plurk or similar microblogging channel. Nor did it wind it’s away through Facebook.
This crisis took place across three “closed” forums. By “closed” I mean that it was in semi-moderated forums focused to a particular topic/industry. Someone posted a topic in a forum, within a short while, others joined in, discussing a product and their feelings about that product. It started only 3 days ago, but by this morning had reached a significant volume and resulted in a large volume of calls to a contact centre and began migrating up to senior management.
We monitor for this client monthly. Which helped. But the challenge of automated Social Media monitoring tools becomes quickly apparent – most of them are locked out of these forums. And this is a huge gap in Social Media monitoring.
Although this issue was “localized” and didn’t hit broadcast Social Media levels, it still caused a drop in sales in just 2 days of 8% and forced a mid-size business to focus many hours of senior management and people resources to contend with it. Fortunately it was kept localized and didn’t seep over into more public forums.
So what are some take-aways for a situation like this?
1. Don’t rely on Google Alerts or basic monitoring services.
2. Find out where “discussions” are going on in closed forums like newsgroups, chats or discussion forums and check in weekly to see what might be going on.
3. A crisis can occur in Social Media in closed loops and cause as much damage as if it hit the more public forums.
4. Engage in these discussions (be open and disclose who you are, trying to pretend your a customer is dangerous) and stay engaged.
5. Often times, these “hidden” sides of Social Media can be of more value than more public forums.
So what do you think? Have you had a similar experience? What steps do you take in this type of issue?