Are you prepared to deal with social media backlash?
Feb 5th
The democratization of publishing through the social web is probably the most significant political, economic, and sociological force of our generation. But we have only seen it begin to coalesce into a political force in the past 12 months. During Arab Spring, it was a unifying force to overthrow dictators. Last month, the web’s united stand stopped proposed legislation in the U.S. that would have impinged Internet sharing and freedom. And a few days ago, it reversed a controversial policy at one of America’s best-known and most powerful non-profit organizations.
This latest example began when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization (famous for its “pink ribbon” campaigns) announced it would halt grants to Planned Parenthood that were used for breast cancer screening for low-income women. According to the reports, this decision was made in December and communicated to Planned Parenthood, which urged Komen to reconsider. Komen cited a new policy that prevented its grants going to organizations under investigation. Planned Parenthood is being investigated over whether government money was improperly spent on abortions. The Komen organization said the decision was final.
This policy would have resulted in cutting off a major source of health screening for the poorest American women and the web rose up once again in a mighty voice of protest, which resulted in a rapid reversal to restore funding to Planned Parenthood.
As this high-profile drama unfolded, it became obvious that this important charitable organization had stepped on a social media land mine without an appropriate communication plan in place, jeopardizing its hard-earned brand. Blogger Kivi Leroux Miller summarized the problem:
“This is what happens when a leading nonprofit jumps into a highly controversial area of public debate without a communications strategy, stays silent, and therefore lets others take over the public dialogue, perhaps permanently redefining the organization and its brand. Watch and learn, so you don’t make the same mistake on whatever hot button issues your organization might be wading into.”
My friend Shonali Burke, truly an authority on non-profit PR and web strategy, analyzed this development carefully in a post called 7 PR Lessons Komen for the Cure Didn’t Know It Was Giving You. She has graciously agreed to share these seven lessons with the {grow} community:
1. Transparency is everything
As I explored this issue, I tried to give Komen the benefit of the doubt. I thought, “Let’s assume that all this is indeed the result of new granting rules.” So I went onto their website (couldn’t even load the blog, still can’t), to read what those policies were, and what they are. After all, surely they’d be on the site, right?
Nope. At least, I haven’t been able to find them, and I spent a lot of time looking.
Finally, I clicked through to some of their affiliate sites, and there they were. But why isn’t there at least an overview of their old and new grant policies on the main site?
Had Komen posted this when its board voted to do this, as the New York Times reported, at least they would have had their own point of view on record before they had to resort – late – to the video response from (Komen executive) Nancy Brinker.
2. Staying on message doesn’t help if you don’t address what people really want to know
In all their statements, Twitter responses (again, late), and so on, Komen has tried to reiterate that their decision is not about politics, and that they are staying true to their mission.
That’s all well and good, but what people really want to know is why Planned Parenthood has been singled out. For example, Penn State University also appears to be in violation of Komen’s new grant policy.
If Komen had been upfront earlier – on its website – with exactly what this new policy is, then it might douse some of the flames. Note, I said “might.” But by digging their heels into the sand, all that’s happening is that we (at least, most of us) took their position with a huge sack of salt.
3. Walk the talk
The NYT article I referenced earlier quotes a Komen board member:
“The organization’s longtime support of Planned Parenthood had already cost it some support from anti-abortion forces, Mr. Raffaelli said. But the board feared that charges that Komen supported organizations under federal investigation for financial improprieties could take a further and unacceptable toll on donations, he said. ‘People don’t understand that a Congressional investigation doesn’t necessarily mean a problem of substance,’ Mr. Raffaelli said. ‘When people read about it in places like Texarkana, Tex., where I’m from, it sounds really bad.’ “
So what is this really about, then? Is it about staying true to its mission, as the Komen organization has repeatedly tried to say, or is it about assuaging those for whom it “sounds really bad”… and not losing significant donor dollars in the process?
And if, according to one of Komen’s own board members, “a Congressional investigation doesn’t necessarily mean a problem of substance,” why not try to educate those who might not understand this, instead of throwing a single – as seems to be the case – organization under the bus?
4. Public relations prediction is part of the job
The ability to anticipate how the public is going to react, and plans for that reaction, are part of a PR professional’s job.
I don’t know who runs Komen’s communications, but boy, have they been asleep on the job. Especially given how acrimonious conversations around Planned Parenthood can get, how could they not have anticipated what would happen… and prepared for it?
Perhaps they did, and were shot down by senior leadership… I don’t know. But whatever happened or, rather, didn’t happen, I’m left with the impression that Komen was so convinced of its own invincibility behind an ocean of pink ribbons that it simply never assumed people would take it to task.
I don’t know if the furor would have not have raged as high had there been some forethought put into how Komen would communicate the new policy. But at least they would have had a shot at shaping the public dialog. No matter what happens hereon out, this is one battle they’ve lost.
5. If your affiliates are distancing themselves from you, you need to worry
When I couldn’t find anything about the Komen grant policies on its main site, I clicked through to a couple of its affiliate sites, as I said.
And while I found the policies there, what really struck me was the lengths Komen Maryland went to to distance itself from the national organization’s policy:
“The new granting criteria announced by Susan G. Komen for the Cure® that now makes Planned Parenthood ineligible for funding was a decision made on the national level. Many of the Komen and Planned Parenthood partnerships that began in 2005 provide women in remote areas with access to breast health services. To date, Komen Maryland has not received a grant application from Planned Parenthood requesting financial assistance.”
Several of the other affiliate sites don’t have as current statements (or any), but if you look at their Facebook pages, you can see how they are trying very hard to reassure their fans that they weren’t part of this decision-making process while trying to toe the party line.
When your chapters are trying to convince their stakeholders that even though they’re you, they’re not really you, you have a problem.
6. Pull your head out of the sand and reply
Replying to your audiences, inquiries, and even attacks, is not an option. Today, conversation is the norm.
Komen was exceedingly late with its responses. It’s been roundly criticized for that, as it should be, and when I couldn’t find information on their grants on the main site, I wrote into the “media” email address, asking for a link. I still haven’t received it.
Perhaps as a tiny blogger I didn’t warrant attention from the media department. The problem is that no matter how tiny we are, we’re all connected in some way, shape or form, to people who might listen to us. And if enough of us make a noise, that can cause problems… and you might get “newsjacked.”
Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, gets that. It walked all over Komen with the way it went straight to the people, generating not just media and public attention, but more support and donations.
7. What goes online doesn’t stay in Vegas
One thread of the still-unfolding story is that Komen’s new policy has been driven in large part by its SVP for Public Policy Karen Handel, a former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who has been vocal that she doesn’t support Planned Parenthood.
The Komen organization says “it’s not about politics” but that is not what it looks like when Ms. Handel got a little too click-happy in retweeting this:
Once you’ve seen this, does it really matter what anyone else at Komen says about the new policy not being politically motivated?
Even though Ms. Handel apparently deleted this tweet, the web has permanent evidence of it. What goes online stays online, even if change your mind later.
What does this mean to these charities?
There are many, many well-intentioned, sincere people working at the Komen organization, and they have brought huge awareness to the issue of breast cancer. It makes me sad that they are probably feeling really upset right now, and fighting their own internal battles because of the way this issue has been managed. Or, I should say, mismanaged.
Is Komen going anywhere? Probably not. Will Planned Parenthood find a way to cultivate the groundswell of supporters it has gained in the last couple of days? I’m sure.
I hope that if you work for or with a non-profit organization, you’ll use this post as an inspiration to put together your own crisis communication plan … well before you need it.
Shonali Burke is one of the most trusted and inspired voices on the non-profit communications scene. In addition to running her own PR agency, she is the driving force behind the Waxing UnLyrical Blog.
Learning From Big Social Media Blunders
Jan 18th
By Stanford Smith, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Advertising Age just published its Book of Ten’s issue. In it they chronicle this year’s Top 10 Social Media Blunders. The list is entertaining and disheartening. Entertaining because of the shenanigans and plain idiotic social media mistakes committed by some very smart people. Disheartening because nervous businesses considering social media may unduly focus on the blunders and ignore the benefits.
Today, I’ll take a moment to speculate “why” the blunders happened and how businesses can learn from their less fortunate brethren’s mistakes.
Dropping the “F” Bomb
The Blunder: New Media Strategies employee mistakenly skewers Detroit drivers from the @ChryslerAutos twitter account. Although the tweet was caught and deleted within minutes, the damage to a career and a high-prestige social media account was done. New Media Strategies fired the employee and Chrysler Fired New Media Strategies.
Why It Happened: The scuttlebutt is that this employee managed his personal and client accounts with the same Twitter management tool. A small lapse in attention easily took his personal tweet and broadcasted it to the world.
Suggestion:
Set a firm policy that personal tweeting should not happen from a company sponsored and administered tool like Hootsuite. Since a mis-tweet could be dire, companies should also consider restricting tweeting from company computers.
Kenneth Cole and the Arab Spring
The Blunder: Kenneth Cole jumped on the Arab Spring news story with a less than elegant tweet:
“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo, Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online”
Why It Happened: Creativity got in the way of common sense. Politics, religion, and um… revolution are incendiary topic that should be handled with care.
Suggestion:
The same conversation rules that work at the bar and family dinners should be applied here. Provocative advertising can get you attention but ultimately it can backfire. Since the risk is often disproportionate to the benefit, it’s better to dig a little deeper for a social play that has more legs and less risk.
Qantas and #QantasLuxury
The Blunder: Bad luck and horrible timing led to the launch of Twitter Contest that asked followers to detail their dream luxury in flight experience. The problem was that the day before union talks had broken down and customers were still upset about a fleet shutdown that disrupted travel plans for thousands.
Why It Happened:
Operations, Customer Service, Marketing, and Social Media weren’t talking. A open-eyed review of social sentiment and actual conversations would have given the social team a heads-up that they were poking a hornet’s nest.
Suggestion:
Invest in a social media monitoring tool that gives real-time and accurate reports on what your community is saying about your brand. Any major social initiative should have a go, no-go, checkoff that polls customer service and operation.
A Face Full of Tomato Sauce
The Blunder: The folks at Ragu stepped in it when they tried to joke about dads lack of kitchen expertise. Ragu’s mistake was creating a video with moms spouting off about their kitchen-illiterate husbands. Not-funny and the Dads blogged en-masse about Ragu’s faux-pas.
Why It Happened: The problem is that Ragu missed a growing movement of dads who are kitchen, diaper, laundry, and bed-time story ninjas. The social web is packed with these interest and lifestyle based interest groups. A simple search would have uncovered the CC Chapman’s of the world and averted the PR misstep.
Suggestion:
Use social networks to monitor the pulse of your customers. A simple poll on Facebook can offer clues to how a marketing campaign, new product launch or price change could be perceived. Which leads to…
Netflix and Qwikster
The Blunder: Netflix decided to raise its prices without talking to their customers first. Next they confused everyone by spinning off their DVD rental into another brand, Qwikster, but failed to secure the Twitter username @Qwikster. The Twitter handle was scooped up by a loser who had a talent for bashing Netflix. The cost of this particular blunder was 800,000 lost subscribers or $192 million in $20/month subscriber fees.
Why It Happened:
Netflix is a savvy online player. On this one they forgot that they had an open channel to poll their most fanatic subscribers. Simply asking them how they would react to the changes would have revealed the gaping holes in their strategy. Ignoring these people created a firestorm that couldn’t be contained.
Suggestion:
Remember that “dialogue” is a competitive weapon. Facebook, Twitter are free to use and incredibly valuable for gathering opinons and soliciting support for company initiatives. It’s a good idea to add “social focus groups” to the traditional customer research done before the roll-out of any new product or service.
5 More Examples
Advertising Age did a terrific job at compiling and profiling these blunders. Read 5 more here.
I’m curious about your perspective on what went wrong with Quantas, Ragu, Netflix, Kenneth Cole, and New Media Strategies. Talk to me in the comments below.
Contributing Columnist Stanford Smith obsesses about how to get passionate people’s blogs noticed and promoted at Pushing Social, except when he’s chasing large mouth bass!
The Anatomy of Truly “Social” Business
Jun 9th
A {grow} Community Week Contribution by Kneale Mann
There is increasing discussion these days about developing a “social business.” The vital word to remember in this name is business — real work tied to a bottom line.
The social business doesn’t start or end in the digital space but rather in the human universe. It includes the creation of a true collaborative, two-way exchange that embraces internal and external customer connection and service.
Labels such as social media, social networking, and social marketing are often misused. Social media are a collection of channels. Social networking is interaction between people through myriad digital and human channels. And social marketing embraces many channels to achieve social good. Channels are simply options.
So How Can You Make Your Company Social?
First it requires superior products or services. Creating an environment where it’s fun to work that has nothing to offer clients is a not a business. We can get distracted by the temptations of the social web and allow emotion to rule the day when we use words such as media and social. But without business, it’s a hobby shrouded in theory. Our customers don’t care how many blog subscribers we have or who visits our YouTube channel. They may ‘like’ our Facebook group but that does not constitute a relationship, yet. They bought our stuff and they expect it to do what we said it would do. So we need an actual business that has customers or the potential of customers before we can build a social business.
Communications and marketing in a truly social business are not necessarily departments; they are tied to every function everyone does every day. Teamwork in a social business does not consist of butt covering, “good enough,” or that isn’t my job declarations. It embraces an understanding of the strengths of each and every person and how they complement the rest of the team. Building a social business is hard work but can be the single most important tactic you can employ to increase profits.
People Buy from People
The construction of a social business requires the realization that human beings build the bottom line, not websites or slick messaging. It is also an environment where stakeholders understand we are all suppliers and we are all customers. We all live on both sides of the counter.
Have you ever been to a restaurant where the person serving you seems to have the best job in the world? Think about the last time you met a convenience store clerk who smiled, made eye contact and meant it when they wished you a good day. The little things are often the biggest things that can make your company social.
Different Things Different Results
Mark or any of the wonderful people in the {grow} community can help companies build on past success and increase their chances of future success. But that begins with the deep desire to look at the way they’re doing business inside and outside of their organization.
It means they may feel uncomfortable for a while but they’ll be in good hands because the goal is to improve, not point fingers or increase workload simply to keep busy. The clear focus is to create an environment where both stakeholders and customers want to be great … and that is how sustained growth is achieved. Building a social business goes well beyond channels and websites.
How can building a truly social business help your bottom line?
Kneale Mann has worked in media and marketing for 27 years. He is the owner and digital marketing strategist, writer and speaker at YouIntegrate. Mann helps medium to large sized organizations improve their digital presence and revenue. Kneale can be reached by email at knealemann@gmail.com. Kneale’s website is www.youintegrate.com and on Twitter he is @knealemann
Stop shoving social media down my throat
May 23rd
It’s time to step up and address one of the great myths pervading the social web — that an essential best practice is decentralizing social media marketing and pushing it down to employees at every level of the company. This is a philosophy that sounds good, but is often detached from practical reality.
I have been immersed in the social web for more than three years. It’s a big part of my job. I teach about it. I consult about it, and of course I write about it. And here is a conclusion that I can confidently make: Social media marketing can be very, very difficult to do successfully.
Why force social engagement?
So why do so many people insist that we should be shoving social media down the throats of employees at every level of the company? This is like forcing me to do accounting. It would not be a good fit … I just don’t have that mindset. Not every person has the right mindset, ability, or openness to succeed with social media but that doesn’t mean they can’t still fit in your company.
Of all the people I interact with on the social web, I would say I am most in-tune with Jay Baer. He is a true intellect and I highly recommend a regular dose of his blog Convince and Convert. But we disagree somewhat on this point.
I’m not picking on Jay … his viewpoint is widespread. But his recent post Speak No Evil – Why Trust Isn’t a 4 Letter Word in Social Media, is a good focal point for the issue.
A hiring problem?
Jay concludes that “it’s everyone’s job to represent the company on the social Web” and that if you don’t have employees who can represent you, ”you don’t have a social media problem, you having a hiring problem.”
The underpinning of this hypothesis is that every employee should be both skilled and trustworthy on social media or you are not running your company well. This logic gets further twisted for me with claims that people are communicating stupid things to the outside world in emails any way … so why not trust them to put it out into public on the social web? Seems like apples and oranges. Emails don’t go viral. Just ask NFL player Rashard Mendenhall.
Should everybody tweet?
Jay uses the example of Mendenhall and his recent litany of tweets that were outside mainstream American thinking.
Let’s look at the Mendenhall example. Yes, he was out of step with mainstream thought. But who isn’t to some degree? The man was hired to carry a football toward a goal line, not necessarily to “stay on message” during a news event. So did the Steelers make a ”hiring mistake” because he sends out stupid tweets? No. The guy is one of the best football players on earth.
Part of the ”social media is for everybody” myth is that we should humanize our companies — trust people to be themselves and everything will be OK. Again, this is just too simplistic and disconnected from reality. You just might get what you ask for, as the Steeler ownership discovered.
I work with an extraordinarily gifted man who is one of the best sales people I have ever met. He is kind of “folksy,” maybe even leaning toward redneck. But he is a perfect fit for his marketplace and there is nothing he would not do to serve his customers. The man is a star and he has single-handedly built up his business — he’s probably the most valuable employee in the whole company.
Putting this fella into the public social media spotlight 140 characters at a time would be a disaster. I imagine his tweets would come across as incredibly embarrassing — taken out of the context of the individual and his environment. Does this company have a “hiring issue?” Of course not! His customers understand and love his quirky humor but that doesn’t mean the whole world would. Here is what I would say to him — “You just keep selling your heart out buddy. Don’t worry about Twitter.”
Uniform political correctness is impossible
When consultants pontificate that every employee should have enough common sense to be on the social web, what they are really saying is we need to hire people who are always politically correct. Which of course will create the most boring, ineffective companies — and who would even want to work there? Not every employee has good judgment about everything — especially when we are turning them into public spokespersons.
Before you drink the Kool Aid on this perspective of “cover the world with social media,” ask yourself one question. Think about some of the best bosses and employees you have ever had. Would they take naturally to the social web? And if not, does that make them a bad hiring decision?
Let’s put this into a practical context
Theoretically I agree with Jay. But I think applying social media effectively requires business sense and balance. We wouldn’t force everybody into a sales role. We wouldn’t put everybody into the glare of the six o’clock news in a PR role. Why would we set an expectation that everybody should be able to have a role in social media or that is a sign that we have a “hiring problem” if we don’t? Being adept at social media is NOT EASY for everybody. And we should be able to live with that human diversity.
Instead I think it makes sense to encourage social media participation in the context of the goals of the company, the available resources, the competitive environment, and the talents of the employees:
- I agree with Jay that the PR or marketing department hasn’t cornered the market on social media greatness. Certainly employees can become online ”beacons” for your brand, but don’t force them to do it or dismiss it as a “hiring problem” if they don’t want to blog or participate in Twitter.
- Acknowledge that social media participation is going to occur, sanctioned or not. An explicit social media policy is a must.
- If employees do want to be formally active on the part of a company, give them the training and guidelines they need to do it well. Explain how it connects to strategy and the implications of representing the voice of the company.
- With the increasing importance of social participation, start adding this to the job requirements of new employees, if that is key to their role in the company. For example, I certainly would not care if a star engineer doesn’t want to blog. You know, some people have to be about the business of actually making stuff. Again — “context.”
What do you think?
So I absolutely recognize and appreciate the opportunity that Jay and others put forth, but I think this nuance is important – It’s not that everybody SHOULD be a marketing voice for you company. It’s that everybody COULD be a marketing voice for your company depending on context. This approach simply recognizes human diversity and that an employee can be extremely valuable … even if they don’t participate in the social web. What do you think?
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