It doesn’t take much to start a social media firestorm: one of your employees says something out of line to a customer, and that customer posts it to Facebook or Twitter, or both. One shoddy product. One lost order. One exhausted manager vs. one angry client. One cruel Tweet by an angry ex-employee. Let’s face it, a bad P.R. moment taken to social media can put you out of business, or worse, bring on lawsuits.
As I’ve written before, when things go viral, it’s generally because of something unpleasant, not because of kittens. Social media is a fantastic way to market your business, but let’s face it, if things get ugly, it can be your undoing. You won’t just get negative comments from your angry customers, but from their friends, their cousins across the country, and once that momentum starts, you’ll get angry responses from anyone else who has ever even heard of you. On social media, there are no rules about being civilized, and I have seen perfectly nice people say frankly monstrous things.
So ask yourself, who is going to help you if things get messy? Lots of agencies are claiming to be social media experts now, but are they? You absolutely must ask what kind of services they offer, because if they don’t have a background in public relations, they may be useless if the worst comes to pass.
This is why just one of the services D. Cohn Communications offers is around-the-clock account monitoring. We don’t just make a couple of vague posts for you and call it a week. We are watching what people write about you across all platforms all day long. We don’t start at 9 and stop at 5. We don’t stop on weekends. We don’t stop on holidays. We don’t stop on vacations. Social media doesn’t keep a neat schedule, and neither do we. If we’re awake, we’re watching.
And what do we do if something unpleasant happens? First we alert you, then we advise you, and then we moderate the online conversation as much as possible. When you have 300 negative comments pouring onto your social media accounts, we’ve read all 300, as well as the newspaper columns, their social media pages, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and everything else. We track topics and hashtags. We interact with posts when appropriate to keep conversation as civil as possible. And we do this at 10:30 at night, at 6 in the morning, and all day in between. Whatever it takes. We keep you on top of the online conversation to help you design a plan not to just deal with the crisis, but to recover after it passes.
Don’t pay exorbitant prices to a name-brand ad agency just because they promise you a few social media posts. They don’t care about keeping your business safe online. Shop around and see what services are included in your social media plans. Give D. Cohn Communications a call, because we not only are the best at making social media marketing plans that truly work, we have your back.