Every quarter ICUC hosts a month-long series dedicated to one topic in the social media space. It’s a New Year, and a time for resolutions and hope: so get your social strategy in shape with our first ever “Boot Camp.” Just like a personal trainer, we’ll provide daily content to motivate, inspire, and educate both brands and social media professionals on everything SoMe. Best practices, tips, platform knowledge, tools you can use, advice and insight based on our expertise and experience – we’ll be sharing it all with you, everyday here at Snoo.ws. We hope you’ll stay tuned throughout the month!
DM, RT, +1, J/K, #
Mumbo jumbo to some, to others necessary shorthand when you only have 140 characters to convey a point.
I recently heard of situation where a large company encountered a bit of a social media crisis. Brand X had an unhappy customer. A customer so upset they were making false claims in order to tarnish Brand X’s image. You see the unhappy customer was what we in the biz, classify as “influential.” A high Klout Score, 50K plus followers on Twitter. You get the point.
Behind the scenes, the unhappy customer had everyone from high-level executives to entry-level employees scrambling for a fix. In a series of back and forth emails the Social Media department was coming together with the Public Relations department to find a solution. The Social Media department crafted a personalized response based on the Public Relations suggestions and replied publicly. The response had several social shorthands.
Enter behind the scenes communication breakdown.
The SM team followed up with the PR team sending them a copy of the public response via email so everyone was on the same page. Unfortunately, the PR team wasn’t up to speed on social shorthand. When the messages were being reviewed, the PR team became more concerned with what they saw as spelling and grammar mistakes. DM’s? RT’s? Mumbo jumbo to them. This turned into a firedrill of its own. The PR team spent valuable time trying to resolve typos when they should have been more focused on crisis management. The Social team was then forced to bring the PR team up to speed, also losing valuable time.
By the Social Media team and the Public Relations team coming Brand X was able to eventually defuse the situation. While the SM team and the PR team worked through their own confusion, valuable time was lost and additional social posts were made, bringing unnecessary attention to the situation.
So what can we learn from this situation? Just because your social team understands the ins and outs of social slang, it doen’t mean everyone in your organization does. What steps do you need to be take to proactively stop this from happening to you?