twitter – Page 10 – Andrew Careaga

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall” is an adage that seems to hold true for big brands in social media these days. When big brands mishandle a situation in the social media sphere, the fallout can be significant for the companies.

But these failures hold valuable lessons for us in higher ed social media work. These situations, as they become magnified and amplified into full-blown crises by social media’s “Ever-Shifting Mob” (fellow higher ed blogger Dennis Miller‘s apt description), should serve as cautionary tales for all of us who deal with social media in the higher education.

Brandchannel recently dissected two recent big brand blunders:

The Applebee’s firestorm that occurred after the company fired a waitress for posting a photo of a receipt from a pastor who wrote on the bill, “”I give God 10% why do you get 18”; and
The out-of-control Twitter chatter that occurred in the UK when struggling music retailer HMV announced layoffs, which one of its social media managers live-tweeted.

(Hat tip to Kary Delaria, @KaryD, for sharing the Brandchannel post via Twitter.)

Social media and PR, integrated

Both situations contain important lessons about the importance of integrating social media and public relations functions during a crisis. But there are other issues at play here:

Respond quickly but thoughtfully. Speaking to Brandchannel, SHIFT Communications CEO Todd Defren advises to “respond immediately to show you’re listening, but that needn’t mean falling on the sword. Most reasonable folks just need to know you’re aware and pondering vs. reacting thoughtlessly. ‘We hear you and we’re thinking this through. We’ll get back to you’ is a placeholder for sanity.”
Manage your social media presence. A no-brainer, right? But the ultimate failure in both situations was a lack of organizational structure for handling a brewing social media crisis. “Crisis communications in social should be planning like a PR crisis: there should be both preparation and response,” Teresa Caro of Enguage told Brandchannel. “[B]rands must have an upfront plan that anticipates a reaction.”
Be transparent. It’s cliche, but true. “The essence of a strong relationship with customers is transparency,” said Frederick Felman, CMO of MarkMonitor. “In the case of a faux pas, do the right thing – acknowledge the issue and engage in sincere and honest dialog with the community.”

All great advice. But much of it boils down to 1.) integrating social and PR functions for any organization, 2.) planning and preparing for the inevitable social media dust-up, and 3.) management training and empowering the PR and social media team to respond in real time.

A year ago, I wrote about how the PR and social media functions in higher education should be integrated at all times — not just during a crisis situation. Maybe it’s time to revisit that topic for further discussion, and to see how far higher ed has come in a year.

P.S. – Another post worth reading on one of these crises is Dennis Miller’s A tip for Applebee’s. A higher ed PR veteran, Miller offers some good thoughts on how that corporation and its “sadly under-prepared management” might have handled the situation better.

Image courtesy of © Dead_morozzzka | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

From phone to phenomenon: the hash mark made its mark in 2012.

Who would ever have thought that the pound symbol, once most recognizable as the least useful telephone button, would ascend to greatness?

But with the rise of Twitter, that innocuous little # has taken on great power. Stick it in front of a word or group of words connected without spaces (#likethis), and suddenly that pound symbol (a.k.a. hash mark) harnesses the chaotic flood of tweets into searchable, contextual and even sometimes meaningful bits of information.

On Friday, the American Dialect Society proclaimed “hashtag” as its word of the year. Finally, the humble symbol has received its due recognition.

“Hashtag” beat out contenders like YOLO, fiscal cliff and Gangnam style for the distinction. While those words all have merit, they also have something in common. They are 2012 words that aren’t likely to carry over much beyond the first few months of 2013. Like YOLO itself (perhaps), these words only live once.

Hashtag, on the other hand, has been a persistent little bugger. It’s been with us for more than five years now, almost as long as Twitter itself. (According to GigaOM,the first tweet to ever carry a hashtag was hatched on Aug. 27, 2007.) And it’s likely to continue to live long after our long international Gangnam style nightmare is over.

But why did it take so long for hashtag to gain traction? Ben Zimmer, who chairs the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, explains that 2012 was the year the hashtag transcended Twitter and became a truly multimedia phenomenon.

“This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Zimmer said. “In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”

Think about all the TV shows (and more recently, bowl games) that include hashtags in their promos, or those annoying Facebook connections who affix hashtag to their posts as though they’re on Twitter (even if, or especially if, they’ve never tweeted).

Yes, the hashtag is hear to stay. On Twitter, where there’s a hashtag for everything, there’s even a #hashtag for hashtag. So it’s fitting that it has gained this recognition after struggling in relative obscurity for five long years.

Well played, hashtag. #wellplayed.