Bank of America is in the trenches right now. Like most B of A customers last week, I could not access my account info while attempting to login from www or via mobile device. Of course I jumped on Twitter to follow them for status. As I watched the stream on Twitter unravel, watching everyone’s opinions and complaints about B of A fly by on TweetDeck, I was checking out what Liliana Dumitru-Steffens saw before writing her article “Online PR Crisis: Bank of America Website Down, no Explanation from the Owner“. At first my thoughts were, “cool, they’re on Twitter, they’re gonna let us know what’s up.” Instead what I saw was the online bludgeoning of the folks who were running the Twitter accounts on behalf of B of A by all the customers, but Bank of America was not effectively backing them process-wise. While the customers were snapping at them right and left, shooting first and asking questions later, I realized a couple things. First, I could tell that their Twitter reps were genuinely wanting to help. The problem was the second issue - they were probably to some extent not getting the info they needed from their own employer to respond accordingly with some details that would’ve at least given the B of A customers a little more patience during the crisis.
A Couple Tips for a PR Crisis
- Before choosing Twitter as an official and legitimate support channel for your company, make sure your PR/Communications team are ready to support your Twitter reps with a process for delivering details/status on issues expeditiously so that you don’t hang your social media reps out to dry for your customers to devour and lambaste them when there is a crisis. Sending your soldiers out to battle with no weapons or gear is bad.
- Always stay in front of the PR crisis publicly, with a sense of urgency, and mean it. When a bad PR hit goes down for your company or client on Twitter/Facebook, especially when there are customers being effected (and in this case, they’re hooked in financially which makes them extra edgy), this is your moment to shine and wave the flag of corporate transparency to put them at ease. Customers know that websites have issues, that they get hacked, that they crash or become unavailable. Welcome to technology! However, if they can’t clearly see that you are coordinated with your internal teams with the latest updates, rolling out practical sets of expectations every half hour or so with the latest news, they will hate you quickly and easily. Let them know you are fighting for their right to have a good customer experience.
Also check out the Huffington Post article: “Bank Of America Website DOWN: 2010 Outage Affects Online Banking“. There are some good nuggets in there as well.
Onward.
Social Media Brushfires: Know When to Hold ‘em…
OK…please excuse the tasteless implementation of the Kenny Rogers reference but I think it’s very fitting for this particular post. We should all know the importance and priority of managing bad PR, whether you are a huge publicly traded company, or an up and coming startup, trying to make a good first impression in your respective market. With this comes the responsibility of knowing how to manage and pick your battles through all the noise.
If you are on Twitter/Facebook representing your company, you have a few different responsibilities:
Damage Control
For this post I’ll be focusing on #5 from the above list. One of the most important PR aspects of your job is watching out for bad media coverage, misconstrued news, inaccurate information/statements, manipulation of content for malicious purposes, and the inevitable “brushfire” that can take off like a flaming bullet-train constructed entirely of retweets, moving faster than the speed of Twitter’s API read/write count per second. (Holy run-on sentence Batman.)
As most seasoned PR professionals (which I am not) know, you need to have a damage control strategy and process in place for when the proverbial thorn comes out of nowhere and sticks your company in the ribs until you can find the right tools to extract it. Social media is obviously no exception and needs to be part of that overall process/strategy.
One question I’m asked often is, “How do I know when to respond to a problem tweet, post or person, and to what extent if at all?” While there’s no silver bullet answer because almost every situation is different in it’s subtleties, there are a few things you should think about.
Rules of Engagement
As a father of 3 active boys, I’ve learned to pick my battles almost hourly and am reminded constantly to keep this thought in my arsenal when doing my job online. In SM it’s imperative that you do the same. Not every complaint is worth yours or your company’s time. Some of them are worthless, some are worth noting and others require engagement on some level. Be efficient in your choice of customer entanglement.
Here are a few types of posters that I’ve seen and how I responded:
Be Cool, Go With Your Gut
At the end of the day, you know your company better than anyone else (or at least you should) out there when it comes to public perception and reputation because you observe it all day. Simply continue paying close attention to all the streams of information that are relevant and act accordingly. Just make sure to triple check yourself before reacting to anything, and work very closely with your PR team and management to ensure that you are all on the same page when picking your battles, because there will be many of them for you to choose from, sometimes daily.
Onward.