There are several types of PR disasters and you need to know about those well in order to escape them. You can have insensitive statements, false rewards, inappropriate opinions, hacks and early releases. If you can get rid of these then you are sure to run your business most effectively.
The Perfect Way to Deal with Your Disaster
First of all, make sure not to be too finicky about these mistakes. Take them lightly and try to solve them simply. There are no complicated strategies for you to handle the disasters. Be honest if there has been a fault on your part. Try to be immensely flexible with the media audience and this would be the best way for you to come out of the situation. Do not try to make haste while trying to recover from the downfall. Try to wind up things slowly so that things seem to be simple and achievable.
Rely on Positive and Real Time Slants
Social media PR disasters can happen at any point of time in life. When in crisis you must try to rely on those who are always ready to give positive opinions regarding your brand and your company. On the basis of this positive feedback you can built your castle once more. Remember, a mistake cannot hold a lifelong identity. It is just a passing phase in life.
Give Ear to the Audience
If someone has something to say negative about you please do not avoid the situation. Stand right and concentrate on what is being said. Take the moral out of the whole thing and use it appositely in the coming days of your life. For instance you can refer to disasters such as tweeting, Chevrolet and the bursting of the Sony batteries.
These are cases where all the brands became endangered in the process. It is indeed hard for a good and established brand to regain its lost status. Again, a single mishap cannot be the entire story. You can well utilize your past good name to recover from the pitfalls.
An Instance of Social Media PR Mistake
Here is an instance of how things can get screwed up in matters of PR. There has been a case when a complaining email against a customer was sent to another customer by mistake. This was really not pleasant. It was a sheer act of being careless and unprofessional. It is really going to advertise a wrong and negative notion about the company. However, the best thing to do in this case is not to try things too hard. You can just apologize for what you have done and an acceptance can normalize the entire situation.
I made a similar mistake with my blog that shares psprint gift code and diamonds USA coupon. I was supposed to send a rather harsh email to one of my readers who was just redistributing some of the exclusive coupon codes in my blog. I wanted to warn him through my email, but I accidentally put another regular reader’s id in the “To” box. That regular reader was irked and replied quite angrily. I understood the mistake, apologized to him and to make things better, I offered him some exclusive discount coupons which are otherwise not available in my blog. Somehow, I was able to retain one of my interactive readers.
Social media PR is a sort of binding commercial relationship. The knots are tight and if you make a mistake you can slip in the process. Be alert and try to be true to your customers. You may have some unique business strategies but your audiences and consumers are everything for you. Thus, it is better to be cautious rather than apologizing all along.
Image Credits:Some Communication
17 comments
We all make mistakes, unfortunate but it happens. I agree the best thing is to address the problem and make efforts to get it right. Social media is a beast if your mistake goes viral. It becomes reputation management. Monitoring and managing will help minimize the problems. For the hesitant business owner holding back on social media, your missing a great opportunity. At the very least take a course on social media and get up to speed and get in. University of San Francisco offers a good social media course.
Yes, reputation management is indeed the most important thing when it comes to social media. It’s not about holding your back, but, at the same time, you just cannot overdo it. Balancing the act is the key. By the way, I’ll love to check out your course as well.
I also agree that facing the problem is very hard but this is the 1st step in order to solve it and improve all that’s missing…
Thanks for your comment. I am glad that you agreed with me on this. Yes, rather than crying about the problem, one should be proactive and try to solve the problem.
The first thing that popped in my head when I read this was Ashton Kutcher’s latest Twitter disaster. And he probably did more harm than good when he relenquished control of his twitter account to a PR firm. He should have just owned up to his mistake and went on with life…
Ha Ha Ha!!! Let’s see what future has in store for the actor…
The southwest disaster was epic!
Hi,
Nice one to learn lot of things for make perfect online marketing. You mentioned one thing very well in your blog post which is like that “”Give Ear to the Audience “”this is one of the very important point to notice in online marketing.
It might be the one like Page Rank fall after Page Rank Update of Search Engine of Social Media Sites and than they have to do bit of work to recover that rank….
Thank You….
Thanks for the article.
First of all since we are humans,we tend to make mistakes very often but that shouldn’t be a problem. We can fix the majority of those with not much hassle.
As Dean said,we need to fix our own mistakes.
You need to have the right balance in terms of approach to social media so as not to offend your community or readers on facebook or twitter
Well, if you want to manage your goodwill, communication, brand etc on the social media, you really need dedicated people. It might work for big companies. As for bloggers and webmasters that are on small business models, it is getting tougher and tougher. Earlier I had to just manage and moderate my blog comments. Now, FB is eating up all my time…
To be honest i never keep in mind these mistakes in my social media campaign, but now after read your post i realize that these points are very important and for a successful social media campaign i should keep in mind these points.
I’ve also realized that I should note down what all mistakes I make in my social media campaigns. I never noted down any and now if I’m asked, I’ll barely recall a couple of major ones. Very important post for all the social media users.
Social media PR is one of the commercial relationship and it may have different strategies on here. And, it has an various forms of PR disasters on here. I would like to say thanks for given great post on here 🙂
Tweeting something that doesn’t necessarily reflect the brand’s values or is not thought out is an example of inappropriate opinion.
In-spite of it that i am regular user of social media and use it for my business promotion, but before read your post i was unaware about these kinds of informative things your points are very important to recover our business from this disaster.