Everyone wants to jump on the social media bandwagon, but the route is paved with embarrassing gaffes and failed campaigns. Before you join in, carefully consider the risks of embarking on a social campaign. I offer six ways to mitigate those risks, most of which should be part of the planning process, as well as tips for what to do it if it goes wrong.
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. Chick-Fil-A would have a harder time running a social campaign not because their food offends people, but because public statements from their owners do. Other branding or infrastructural changes might need to be made in order to accommodate for another stab at a social strategy. 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, test your hashtags on a service like RiteTag to see if it's already being used in a negative way. Do a Twitter search as well to see how it's being used. Then, think about how people who don't like your brand might use the hashtag. For example, the NYPD launched a social campaign asking the public to submit photos of themselves with cops. They intended for the public to pose for selfies with friendly officers. Instead, activists posted photos of police brutality. In addition to the NYPD generally being unpopular right now, the hashtag "myNYPD" was too vague and too many people's "myNYPD" turned out to actually reflect negative experiences, hurting the NYPD's image. Frankly, it's hard to think of a good hashtag for an NYPD campaign, which goes back to point #1.
4. Choose the right type of campaign.
Social campaigns can be tied to a seasonal event, like the pumpkin latte craze, 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.
It seems that a new social media flub is posted every day. Most of these are quickly forgotten as minor internet misdeeds, but the big flame-outs can live on in the public's memory. Planning your campaign in advance is the best way to avoid a spectacular failure, but train your staff on the proper response should the public see your carefully planned campaign in a different light.