Social Media Cons

Ah social media, the thing everyone wants to do and thinks they can do, but few can actually do. It’s a great way for a brand to engage and interact with their consumers but it’s also a new way for consumers to voice their opinions (good or bad) of brands to a whole new venue of people. Either not responding or deleting these things can result in even more backlash against the brand.  Of course there is the other end of the spectrum where brands post too much and can start to get ignored by the consumers. A good example of that is the Forever 21 Facebook page. They post about 4 times a day (about nothing specific or about the brand) and they receive a .05% interaction between their brand, receiving only a few likes and comments per post, despite the fact they have several million fans.

Twitter seems to be the largest outlet for brands messing up their PR. Chrysler & Kenneth Cole both tweeted things that didn’t go over well with their followers. Chrysler tweeted “considering they call detroit the #motorcity it’s amazing no one can f@#$ing drive!”. And Kenneth Cole tweeted about the Egypt riots and their new fall collection. The only way to save face on something like that is to just apologize and maybe show some support to the riots in some way. Another way is to just not tweet stuff that could be interpreted negatively in any way.

The worst is when brand’s tried to not only censor their social media but also other social media outlets. Dell tried to get the Consumerist blog to delete a post showing Dell in a negative light. Even if they managed to get the post removed red flags would have been thrown up around the community and it would have started to look suspicious. These old school brands though need to learn that trying to censor these independent sites is near impossible, and will cause more backlash then if they were to just let them post it, and let their few hundred site visitors see it, and forget about it in a few months.

And of course brands have to worry about other “rogue” accounts that aren’t run by the company and are just being posted on by random people. Some people are just fans of the page and can due it to show support for the brand and others can create them and pose negative messages about the company. The most notable was the fake British Petroleum twitter account that sprung about posting things during the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. It was the last thing that BP needed during this disaster and only added to their deteriorating image. And of course there was really nothing they could do, as Twitter refused to give BP the poster’s information and to shut down the account.