Social campaigns are the hottest way to promote businesses and services, but they can be very risky. The examples of social campaigns gone wrong, or even simple social flubs, are numerous. If you’re considering a social campaign, consider these six ways to reduce the risk of blowing it big time.
1. Make sure your business is suitable for a social campaign
Before embarking on a social campaign, use a monitoring service like BrandWatch to see what the internet is saying about your brand. If sentiment is generally negative, identify and fix those core brand or product issues before you embark on your social campaign. You can’t fix bad service with a feel-good social campaign, but you can use one to promote your improvements and repair your social image after complaints have been resolved. This is especially true if you’ve made fundamental changes to your product and/or service in response to customer demands. Let your customers know you heard them.
2. Make sure your management isn’t controversial
If you’re a major-brand refrigerator manufacturer, you’re not likely to offend people, but controversy could still find you if you’re not careful. Recently, the Cardiff branch of popular restaurant chain Burger & Lobster took to Facebook to ‘name and shame’ a family who left without paying by uploading a photo of the family from their CCTV system. While Burger & Lobster would claim that the sole intention of their actions was to simply have the guests come back and pay, the way in which they publicly did so was met with fury online and would not have been the response that the chain was looking for. When provided an opportunity, the public will always use a social campaign as an entry point to make their opinion known. Hint: If you must do a social campaign in the midst of controversy, then avoid platforms that allow users to freely post comments that will be seen by everyone (see point #4 for more details).
3. Phrase your message carefully
Hashtags that seem innocuous can be twisted by the public to take on new meaning. Before launching a campaign, think about how people who don’t like your brand might use the hashtag. For example, British Gas launched a Twitter Q&A campaign in late 2013 for their Customer Services Director to take part in using the hashtag ‘#AskBG’, just a few days after raising prices by 9.2%. The response they received was less than complimentary, with many tweeters choosing to vent their anger at price rises than actively join in the Q&A as British Gas would have hoped, resulting in a poorly mistimed social campaign.
4. Choose the Right Type of Campaign
Social campaigns can be tied to a seasonal event, like John Lewis’ ‘#MontyThePenguin’ hashtag, or they can be evergreen, always relevant. If you’re new at social campaigns, a seasonal campaign is the safer choice to start. Seasonal campaigns are more likely to die off as the season passes. Evergreen campaigns can return to haunt you for months after an unsuccessful launch. For seasonal campaigns, consider a paid component to drive more traffic and buzz to the event or product release such as a display retargeting campaign, sweepstakes, or other exciting offer.
5. Choose your platform and timing carefully
Twitter is very hard to control. Once you put a hashtag out there, it belongs to the world. Facebook is much easier to control, especially if you ask people to post to a page you moderate. Pinterest and Instagram probably generate less controversy, because the audience tends to prefer pretty photos. Good for a home store, bad for McDonald’s.
6. Respond appropriately
When social campaigns go wrong, most companies respond by taking down the campaign and quietly going about their business. Unfortunately for them, the internet is forever. The public can continue to use the hashtag even if you stop the campaign. When McDonald’s launched #McDStories, the public immediately responded with pictures of contaminated food. McDonald’s halted the campaign, claimed it hadn’t done any harm, and ignored the issue. A better response would have been, “We’re sorry. We will investigate these matters.” They then should have conducted a real investigation and solved the core problem. Social campaigns are for your customers as much as your brand. Whenever you run a campaign, make sure that someone reads all the responses, reports on sentiment, and formulates an appropriate response.
One or two internet misdeeds will quickly sink in the rankings if you follow up with an appropriate response. However, you can avoid those misdeeds entirely if you plan your social campaigns carefully instead of rushing to be a part of the conversation, regardless of what that conversation might be.
By Ben Keightley, Business Development Manager at The Search Agency.
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