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While social media has been hailed as nothing short of a marketing revolution, it is always astonishing to see how quickly things can turn sour.
Popular personalities can lose multimillion-dollar sponsorships with one careless tweet, and blue-chip companies can watch their cultivated reputations crumble with one crass Facebook post.
On the corporate side, social media managers have to be increasingly careful about how they manage campaigns.
Both MasterCard and McDonald’s have fallen victim to severe ‘bashtagging’ – when Twitter users turn well-meaning hashtags against a brand to fuel negative sentiments.
Then there are the pure gaffes, such as when US Airways responded to a customer tweet and accidentally included a link to a pornographic image.
While neither individuals nor corporates can exercise complete control over what is being said on social media, or how followers respond to campaigns, many organisations are embracing social media policies in an effort to mitigate some of the risks.
While local companies have been somewhat behind their global counterparts in enacting these policies, local experts say this is now changing.
“Larger SA corporates are recognising the need for this and making sure that they update their policies annually because social media is such a fast-paced environment with many new uses of platforms, like Snapchat and Instagram, becoming popular,” says Donovan White, social media strategist at digital agency NATIVE VML.
“When new platforms become popular, new forms of online behaviour become a reality and they need to account for this.”
Adrienne McCarthy from Addon Digital agrees that bigger companies are embracing social media policies, but it is still rare among SMEs – who are just as at risk.
Explains James Wilson, general manager at PR agency Waggener Edstrom SA: “Social media policies are important for any business that is active online.
First and foremost, they ensure that every individual who handles a company’s social media is consistent in how they engage on a brand’s behalf.
With more and more brands increasing the number of internal staff to ‘community manage’, in essence, these policies provide control in an environment that can be difficult to control.”
With social media policies in place, businesses are essentially guarding against reputational damage by ensuring that employees take on some kind of responsibility.
“This is particularly relevant bearing in mind how quickly social media can turn a small issue into a global problem,” adds Wilson.
“Policies assist with enforcing due diligence amongst staff, in terms of the measures they must put in place via their own personal social media, to ensure that their own opinions and points of view do not tarnish those of their employers.”
This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the 9 April 2015 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
