The McDonald’s Twitter account hit a major bump in the road as it closed out 2017. On Black Friday, the fast food giant presumably wanted to tweet out a promo deal to shoppers but instead tweeted this: “Black Friday ****Need copy and link****.”
How does this sort of social media blunder happen at such a large and successful organization? Even with sophisticated software and multiple departments involved, companies still manage to miss obvious mistakes because of the rapid pace of social channels. The desire to be the first and funniest overtakes reasonable caution, leading to well-meaning missteps such as this one from New Zealand in which police unintentionally made light of car crash fatalities.
Now that social media has become the face of the company to many consumers, brands must rethink how they handle their social accounts. The problem doesn’t boil down to personnel alone, though. A combination of better training, processes and personnel can prevent unwanted social media attention.
Building a better social strategy.
Social accounts play an outsized role in establishing the public identities of brands. Companies must be cautious when selecting people to represent them online, but they also must tread carefully when training personnel and building the processes that guide social media communications.
By focusing on these three areas, smart companies can create a social media response culture that presents the best face of the brand:
1. Establish a clear social media process.
Follow the chain of creation, approval, distribution and analysis on every social media account to identify potential problem areas. Investigate your reactive content (including customer care), as well as your proactive content (marketing posts). How does a potential tweet or post make its way from internal team to agency to approval to published? This is particularly important for staged social — “set and forget” software makes it easy to assume everything is fine, but problems can still occur.
Develop concrete policies to interrupt regular social media schedules when necessary. If tragedy strikes — the death of a public figure, for instance — treat the event with respect, and don’t attempt to latch on inappropriately. Cinnabon…
