Anjuan Simmons and I conducted a CORE Conversation at SxSW Interactive this year called: How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business Model. I will quickly outline the five ideas that we had. The audience had many more, plus lots of questions and feedback. We also discussed a number of case studies, which you can look at in the Slideshare presentation I have embedded at the end of this post that we developed to accompany the discussion.
You can also look at the transcript of the Twitter conversation, with the hashtag #sxswdestroy. As an aside, SxSW doesn’t provide audio-visual or sound support in Core Conversations and our audience let us know about it! The room was also set up with only about 50 chairs, which in this case turned out to be a very bad thing. This resulted in some frustration by people who had trouble hearing and also by people who were sitting on the floor.
Five Cs: Avoid Business Disaster Online
1. Customer service: The overall sentiment of your company online might be around customer service issues. If you are find yourself in this position you should graft your customer service processes into new channels.
2. Crisis: The big fear of any company is a massive and widespread crisis. Having relationships ahead of time, both external and internal are critical. Also a flowchart that lays out a basic response framework.
3. Corporate speak: Leading with “policy” when communicating during a crisis in social media is always going to lead to failure. Policies are important but communication strategy should not lead with policy as an argument.
4. Competition: Both you and your customers can gain competitive advantages by being plugged into the chatter around your company. Be sure you are monitoring and have the necessary authority in place, or have access to such authority, to move quickly.
5. Confidentiality: Clearly, breaches of company confidentiality and secrets are a major concern. As much of concern are employees, self identified or not, that can hurt your brand with off-color comments that are tied to the company. Moreover, employees themselves can be compromised.
How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business Model
We also called on Shashi Bellamkonda (@ShashiB and @Netsolcares, Social Media Swami for Network Solutions and Rob La Gesse (@kr8tr) of Rackspace and Building43 to talk a little bit about Customer Service.
I would love your thoughts on how to avoid some of these mistakes and any insight you might have or useful examples.
Other Resources
- Case Study: Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters: Sentiment Analysis and Mourning: Michael Jackson on Twitter, By Elsa Kim and Sam Gilbert with Michael J. Edwards and Erhardt Graeff (via David Fisher @tibbon)
- Reviewe’d: Twitter sentiment analysis tool (via @Reviewd
- The Social Media Policy Tool is a great way to start (but not finish) your company's Social Media policy.
