Social Media: One day at a time

Crisis management is important and critical.

But what happens before the crisis?

What tools and systems do we have in place to manage our company's behavior in social media spaces?

 

A lot of organizations are scrambling to get a social media policy in place.

A few I've spoken to have gone as far as core skill training.

Some have "bypassed" the problem by just outlawing social media (or better yet refusing to admit it exists.)

57% of workers use their smart phone from the bathroom. So good luck on that front.

For those of us exploring how to leverage these spaces and interactions, how do we define the behaviors appropriate for representatives of a brand?

At Twist Image, we've been using a scenario guidelines approach.

This has proven to be a very effective tool as we can give examples of how to respond to a range of standard situations (happy, misinformed, angry, looking for assistance, etc.) and also identify some hot spots or opportunities unique to the brand/organization.

We recently prepared a set of scenarios for one of our larger clients.

The report was peppered with great examples of what not to say to consumers.

We then follow up each no-no with what we should say.

The only problem is that all the "do not say" examples were real.

They were taken directly from people trained to be customer service representatives for the brand.

Some were quite dreadful and made our client shake their head sadly a few times.

And it made me wonder.

How many of us are relying on our standard "customer service" training?

Or worse, just praying that people will use common sense and that the social media policy is enough?