Social Media insurance – minimize risk with a little foresight.

Imagine if people discover something unexpected and not necessarily flattering about your product. For a relatively mild example of this, it turns out that last year’s smartphones from Palm – the Pre series – have edges sharp enough to cut cheese. This is the most minor of design considerations, but it could easily sway an undecided buyer to pick up a blunt iPhone or BlackBerry instead.

Ari Newman of iMediaConnection breaks down how to fix this in his latest post, detailing how your company needs to use social media to its advantage when a video like the one above goes viral.

At least the Pre really does cut cheese, along with other malleable foodstuffs. But an allegation doesn’t have to be fair to turn into public relations poison. A generation ago, NBC showed video of ostensibly safe GM pickup trucks not merely overturning or crashing, but exploding. Millions of people saw the video, but not all of them were listening when it eventually came out that the trucks were in little danger of exploding unless NBC management happened to attach explosives to the trucks.

A similar thing happened this February, when Southwest Airlines prohibited a morbidly obese movie director from getting on a fully booked flight. Even through he was 100% in the wrong, the director leveraged his ability to draw attention to himself and his plight, temporarily damaging Southwest’s positive reputation in the process. (If I were the person in the adjacent seat, who now got to enjoy my flight without having to share it with someone else’s lipid rolls, I’d have gone on YouTube and WordPress and Twitter to get the word out about how Southwest is a wonderful company that looks out for its normal-sized patrons.)

Toyotas drive themselves at 100 miles an hour, Denny’s hates black people, Amazon censors George Orwell novels…there’s a huge and gullible part of the public that loves to assume the worst about businesses and takes every negative thing it hears secondhand as Holy Scripture. And if a bad message can get out, it will. Quickly. There’s almost no such thing as lag time anymore, either. For a big, publicly-traded multinational firm, a public perception setback can take years to recover from. For a small or medium-sized company, it can prove fatal.

Therefore, you need to build a defensive social media strategy – the social media equivalent of a fire extinguisher. Newman recommends you create a social media “war room” as a preventative measure, and populate it exclusively with the appropriate people. While everyone in the company stands to benefit from an aggressive response to negative PR, too many cooks can spoil the message. Newman suggests that you limit participation to your marketing head and the product managers directly connected to the product that’s getting all the attention. And of course, include the people who already run your social media. (You mean you haven’t got a dedicated person or team for social media yet? Find one immediately, then return to this post when you’re done.)

Once you’ve determined who, determine what. Figuring out your response before the crisis hits is the whole point of the exercise. Keep it closed. While everyone on the inside will know about the crisis, only a few should be authorized to discuss it. Mavericks have their place, but in front of a TV camera, speaking extemporaneously is not it. Limiting the ranks of the crisis team has an additional benefit, too. It tells the other people in the company that there’s no need to worry should anything bad happen, because you’ve got a team specifically entrusted with the task of fixing things. It’s just part of a successful division of labor: let the other employees do what they do, and not worry about social media crisis management.  In the same vein, employees don’t worry about having to request their paychecks every two weeks, because your company has a dedicated payroll department/person.  They don’t think twice about answering the phones and collecting the mail, because you have a receptionist. Same thing.

The social media team should Google your company daily, and collect the relevant RSS feeds. A recalcitrant blogger could be spending months assailing your company before you ever find out about it. Just ask the committed people with a lot of time on their hands behind KBHomeSucks.com, PayPalSucks.com, AllstateInsuranceSucks.com, AmexSux.com, WalMart-Blows.com…you get the idea. If your company gets large enough and successful enough that it engenders this kind of detraction, don’t fret. Consider it an inevitable challenge to overcome on the way to growth, like having to move into a larger building or collect more sales taxes. But act, don’t react – find who’s responsible for capitalizing on your company’s misfortune and take the noble step of trying to make things right. Maybe the detractors have some semblance of a point. It’s hard to put things more succinctly than Newman does: “When social media is your friend, it’s a lot less likely to become your enemy.”

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