As an increasing number of businesses start to use social media, there are an increasing amount of examples of bad crisis management. Multi-channel marketing, user generated content, access to social networks via mobile devices – all of these have contributed to the customer having greater power to make mountains out of molehills, or to legitimately highlight a company’s flaws and misdemeanours to a global audience.
So what do you need to know to manage a social media crisis?
What is a crisis?
This is an important point and requires definition. What exactly is a crisis and what is an issue? Broadly speaking a crisis would be significant enough to have an impact on the bottom line or cause long term damage to your brand reputation (which arguably, could effect your bottom line). An issue is something which will cause a bit of a stir, may result in your customers needing some extra TLC, but ultimately will not cost you financially.
What your businesses classes as a crisis will differ from sector to sector and company to company. It will also depend on your market share, brand values and a whole host of other factors. Consider these carefully, from the point of view of your …
This week has seen a host of Google+ updates to the service and its mobile apps. However the biggest is the launch of Custom URL’s to everybody. The URL’s were made available to high profile brands and personalities last year but Google is now rolling them out to users. In order to get a Custom URL though you have to hit certain criteria:
Eligibility for People:
10 or more followers
Your account is 30 days old or more
A profile photo
Eligibility for Local Google+ pages: Must be a verified local business
Eligibility for Non-local Google+ pages: Must be linked to a website
It initially looks like the Custom URL Google assigns is based on the address of the website you have on your page. That is causing a bit of a problem who’s domain isn’t the same as the company name, at the moment the FAQ’s are saying that once assigned the URL cannot be altered, so if your URL isn’t similar to your brand or company name it may be worth holding off our using a service such as http://gplus.to/.
The Major Change
Perhaps the biggest game changing feature is that Google are in the process of rolling out is that when in a browser if you …
Keyword strategy – a simple message stated with intense frequency in many places. Leaving fingerprints and footprints across the web.
1 Make sure you have a key word strategy for your on line brand or specific blog post.
2 Identify the keywords in your key word strategy.
3 Use the keywords in the title of any blog post or article
4 Repeat keywords three times throughout the introduction, synopsis or extract.
5 Use sub headings with key words throughout the article or blog post.
6 Include at least three keywords in the keyword or tag field or meta tag data.
7 Link to the published article with social media, including Facebook, Twitter Linkedin, Google+, other blogposts.
8 Be consistent in the use of keywords, strategy or style.
9 Authorship, use the Google Authorship tool and guidelines to ensure your article is linked to your “online reference library”.
10 Provide links to other relevant articles or web links.
By John Ashcroft, Economics, Corporate Strategy, Social Media . Check out the web site John Ashcroft and Company, and The Saturday Economist. John Ashcroft is the Economist with Strategy and Business Experience worth sharing. Oh …
Katy Young’s Guide to…Google+. Everything a first time user should know about Google+. Read the e-book here.
I have to say am I not yet a disciple of Google+. I found it to be frustrating to try and understand and a little overloaded with features. I was also unable to find a guide for beginners. It seems most people on Google+ just expect the rest of us to be experts too.
I can sympathise with the Google’s intentions in creating Google+. It deals with many of the flaws and gaps in Facebook and Twitter, for example Google+ allows you to share posts only with certain groups, and enables you to edit your posts after you’ve shared them.
However, after hours of research in to finally understanding the purpose of a ‘Hangout’, I came to the conclusion that for me the added bonuses of Google+ didn’t outweigh the extra time I would have to spend managing another social media profile.
That said, you may well be willing to devote more time to social media than me and/or for certain types of users there are significant extra benefits to maintaining a Google+ account.
There is also the advantage of being ahead …
