When Communities Turn Against You

A thought experiment: Your brand has been slowly building a community online. You are managing this community and are pouring your life blood into making sure that everybody is happy and that it keeps growing. It keeps you up at night and gets you out of bed early in the morning. Your boss is amazed at how well it’s going and then… disaster. Your brand makes a business change which your community doesn’t like. Within 30 minutes you have 100 new Facebook posts in your group. Twitter is going crazy and the press has just gotten hold of it – negative momentum is building. Your boss looks to you and says “Now what?” (After all, the digital community is your responsibility – even if the situation which caused the unhappiness isn’t).

For most brands this will happen at some point in their lifecycle, to a varying degree, and it really sucks! Below are some considerations and steps which should be taken to remedy the situation.

People are upset with the business not with you personally. While you are in the business of building relationships you need to make sure that any personal pains don’t filter into how you engage.

A general rule when faced with a crisis of any sort is to make sure you understand the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How of the situation. Writing up a short, half page doc explaining these details can really assist in getting the team to focus on the job at hand.

Within the business itself you, as the social media manager, have a responsibility to your community – to represent them and make sure that their feelings are being heard within the business. You need to push the internal teams to respond appropriately by providing them with all the necessary live information that you can find.

Once a decision has been made you only really have one chance to get that message out there. Once its been decided you cannot change your mind. So, make a decision, communicate it to the community then be ready to defend it with honest responses.

In many cases brands make the situation worse by doing a poor job at communicating with the community. Responses should contain all the necessary information for the community itself to make its own decision about the situation. If done correctly then the market will come to the same conclusion that you did and will begin to self-regulate.

As with the point above you should aim to be as honest as possible. Consumer will catch you out if you are not and that completely undermines trust in the brand itself (which is the entire purpose of managing the unhappy community).

7)      Be careful of the trap: consumers aren’t always right

We see a lot of this: a consumer said XYZ so we should be doing XYZ. The reality is that while consumers are a fantastic source of insight into the business one needs to be very careful of what business changes are made based on their feedback. One person making a comment is likely to be meaningless but 50 talking about the same trend provides real tangible feedback. Consumers, on mass, are almost always right – not in what they are saying but rather in the trend which develops. One should always look at the “meta-insight” rather than the face value of what is being said.

Momentum in the digital space grows tremendously quickly. Social media is build to share information rapidly and the faster one is able to act, the less the impact will be. Creating a standing crisis team who has the jurisdiction to make any communications/marketing decision is a great way to shortening the decision process. Ideally, one should get all major stakeholders into a room and make decisions as a group, then roll them out within the separate channels such as digital, press, in-stores etc (as is the case with VOC in events management).

9)      At every point look to turn the situation around

Call me an optimist but I strongly believe that there is no situation so dire that nothing can be done about it to turn it around. The trick is for the business to identify what needs to happen and then decide if it’s the right decision for the business. This is no easy task and it’s often easiest to work it out by asking the following questions which are the most common causes of a community going rouge:

• Did the brand break a major brand promise? (remedy: modify business)
• Did the brand tell a lie? (remedy: apologise and explain why it was made)
• Did the brand get misquoted and made to look bad? (remedy: explain misquote and provide full quote)
• Does the market just not understand how the situation will benefit them? (remedy: educate them)

Depending on the answers you should have a fairly good view of how to respond.