Protecting Your Business From Bad Social Media

Most of you can remember logging into Facebook, Reddit or Digg to be confronted by terrible images of animals being abused on commercial farms and pizza’s being tainted by restaurant workers.  We can also remember logging into see that Keanu Reeves gave $50 million dollars to the animators of The Matrix . . .  These stories illustrate that social media can be the best friend you ever had or the worst enemy you ever made.  It can literally redefine a person, or a business, overnight.

Want your business to stay on the right side of social media?  Here’s some practical advice:

1. Lead by example. Every leader, business or government, is a target for the social media.  What you say or write to customers, employees and competitors is always on the record.   Remind those who work with you that the world is always watching them too.  Reward those who generate positive attention from social or mass media, and quickly address the behavior of those who generate negative attention instead.
2. Keep your employees happy. Some of the most toxic social media is generated by employees who have a legitimate axe to grind with their employers.  If your co-workers can’t get their concerns addressed internally, they may well seek for resolutions outside the business.
3. Respond to customer support and satisfaction issues before they become public promptly, professionally and honestly. Employees should always be courteous, so create the conditions that encourage people to make good decisions and the protocols that they can use to escalate very dissatisfied customers to the correct level quickly.  When too much escalation for you to handle is occurring, that’s a sign that your business has some underlying issues that need to be addressed immediately.
4. Create strategies for generating positive social media every week. If your company has a fan club on Facebook posting thousands of happy customer stories, it is unlikely that a few angry words by one unhappy customer or employee will cause a problem.
5. If negative social media does come to your attention, respond to it immediately, honestly, professionally and politely. Bad social media should be handled by corporate presidents and other high profile professionals. It should be treated like a TV appearance, because anything you say in such a public forum will be seen by as many people.
6. Seek legal remedies, when appropriate, to handle customers and employees who spread inaccurate and damaging statements about you.  You can have websites pull down misleading information, and you can go after individuals to make them stop targeting you.  Some enterprises make employees sign confidentiality agreements to help inhibit the transfer of information outside the company.
7. Don’t let negative social media overwhelm you. If your enterprise is sound, your people are good, your products and services valuable, social media is unlikely to damage your business permanently.

If you follow these seven steps, you’ll find it is fairly easy to stay on the right side of the social media masses. While it may seem strange that so much of your business must be governed by what the masses might say about you, the truth is that word of mouth has always been key to business survival.  The Internet simply makes it easy for words to travel very fast and very far and to be remembered for a very long time.