Forewarned is forearmed, as the old adage goes, and social media is definitely no exception. This past weekend I went to a Thanxsgiving, hosted by David Beyer of Cortex Healthcare, and got into some really great conversations about forays into Facebook and Twitter.  The questions that mostly arose were as always, related to privacy, naysayers, reputation… credibility. He compared his organization to a diver standing on the edge of the board – nervous because perhaps the pool below doesn’t have any water in it.

But how do we keep them from saying anything negative?

You can’t.

Then how do we keep other people from seeing the negative and it snowballing out of control?

You can’t do that either.

Not exactly a motivator, right?  But the benefits of social media are just too huge to ignore, and companies who do may find themselves profoundly ‘behind the ball’ in the new digital age. So how can a new organization (or an old organization, reluctant to let go of private information and resistant to change) jump on the social media bandwagon without embarassing itself?

1) Research, read, reflect.

Find articles about social media, about branding, about selling products or yourself, and study them. Ask critical questions like “how do we want to portray ourselves? what kind of organization are we really? are we going to allow lots of people to tweet or just one? are we going to do customer service via twitter or just post updates?” Whatever you answers are, research those topics and follow the advice of the experts. You wouldn’t try to fly a plane without instructions, would you?

2) Check out the competition.

If your opponent is on Twitter, study his tweets. If other organizations like yours are online, go through theirs. Notice who follows them and why. Make a list of who seems awesome and who sucks, and emulate the best.

3) Take criticisms seriously.

The best brands on Twitter and Facebook look at every naysayer as a chance to win over a new customer… not as a chance to throw  up their hands and claim social media ruined their business.

4) Don’t oversell it.

Don’t place ads directly in your tweet stream. Don’t direct message people unless you know that they want you to.  Don’t stalk Twitter users and for heaven’s sake be professional (but personable).

5) Apologize.

Maybe this should have been number one. If you screw up, if you have some really negative feedback, apologize. Profusely.  The power of social media is that a negative message can spread to a million people within hours. But you know… it wouldn’t spread so fast if it weren’t big news – which means you really effed up. In which case, the best thing to do is own up, make it right, and move on.  I look at recent events (like the cookssource debacle) and I think, if only they’d just apologized and made it right.  Some people say their “downfall” was the power of the mob… but technically their downfall was the fact that they found plagiarism to be totally hunkydory, and were smug when someone pointed it out.     Being aware that organizational mistakes are amplified doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes. It just means you’ll need to correct them quickly and publicly.

Next post, I promise, will be great guides/resources for getting social media savvy!

-Rachelle