A bit of S&M abuse

So, last night I was the subject of S&M abuse. Social media, obviously. And no, not trolling or anything like that – that is for a different post.

No, I found my Twitter feed being exploited. One of the people that I follow posted links to his project six times within an hour.

Now, bearing in mind that I have already stopped following the Twitter feed for his project, because of the overuse of Twitter, this was all the more annoying.

The project feed spent hours, days, weeks even, silent; before bombarding my feed with up to two dozen posts within a hour.

So I stopped following.

But even if I hadn’t stopped following, what are the chances that I would have read the posts, let alone followed the links? Probably slim to nil. It’s information overload, bombardment. I may look at the first post, but after that I just scroll past. The news/fun aggregators like BuzzFeed and The Poke can be very similar – infodumping. Trickle-feeding is best, unless the info is specifically related to each other that
necessarily requires the fast-drip, linked postings.

And this is where businesses – well, organisations in general – are struggling to get to grips with social media. I’ve had similar problems on Facebook, where I had to ‘like’ a brand to enter a competition or such like, but they then bombarded me with posts. The worst was my local pub, who would post four or five times a day, telling me their drinks offers that night – the same drinks offers in each post, and the same drinks offers as in their post the previous week. And the one before that. It probably wouldn’t have been too bad if they hadn’t had such poor grammar and spelling.

So, how should a business be using social media? Or should they use it at all? It’s the fad of the moment, but does it actually show a business out of touch with technology, with a lack of understanding or naivety about promotion?

Waitrose may well have inadvertently pulled a double bluff on this recently. They asked their tweeters to complete the sentence “I shop at Waitrose because…” The problem is that they couldn’t moderate the response. Back in the old days of email entries or complaints they could publish what they choose. If you searched for the hashtag #waitrosereasons in the aftermath, there was some comedy gold in amongst
the legitimate reasons. But the fact that the strategy itself has made the comment pages of the business section of the newspapers may have given Waitrose a tickle from the same hand that slapped it – it certainly got a promotion of one form or another. Who knows, maybe the whole thing was designed and instigated by their PR, with a wag within Waitrose creating spoof accounts and witty one-liners? Such cannot be said about the McDonalds #fail where McDstories was simply subject to abuse.

But who follows Waitrose anyway? Or any of the businesses on Twitter? And why? A lot of businesses these days seem to have told their appropriate department “We need a Twitter account and a Facebook. Not sure why, but everyone is doing it”.

Now, if you are using your Facebook page as an alternative – or even an addition – to your website, to provide information about your product or service, then fine. I can see someday that Facebook may be the go-to page where once the Yellow pages was; and may even overstep the Google search on that. And, perhaps with Twitter they are simply trying to open up another line of communication which is slightly less formal than email.

Yesterday, for example, I tweeted @nationalrailenq to find out what the problem was with my train. They responded about a signal failure pretty quickly. Brilliant. The problem occurs when you consider that 90% of the reason people contact a business customer service department is to complain, and Twitter is showing that complaint very publically to the dozen or so people that follow either the complainant or the business.

But doesn’t that happen anyway? I was in the pub last night chatting to my friend and bemoaning the service I had recently had from a lost property department. Yes, I was sharing my gripe with considerably fewer than if I had done it on Twitter (I did that too, on Monday, and then apologised in the same manner and praised said lost property on Tuesday when they went beyond the pail to assist me), but I was still airing off. And when I did it on Monday, they were at least able to respond (not very usefully with a simple “Please contact our customer service department who will try to help” tweet).

Perhaps to that extent it allows them to limit any damage and respond quicker to any complaints. It could even go favourably, or at least balance out and give a more realistic view to the public. The risk, though is that you lose control. Whether simply as an open line of communication or as an active promotional channel, you may find a troll hijacks your hashtag and you end up with PR egg on your face.

But, that said, I don’t follow @nationalrailenq, nor do I follow the lost property department. Maybe they don’t want me to. I can’t imagine that with the latter certainly as they advertise their @address with “keep up to date with our latest developments”. @nationalrailenq do, however, follow me. I’m not too sure why, but
If they are expecting photos of food and cats they are going to be disappointed.

One of my friends regularly berates his train companies over Twitter for their failures. Every now and again he gets a polite response back, but most of the time there is nothing. Whether they use that internally for feedback is another matter; but I have seen other friends chip in to the conversation, collectively assailing the already-catastrophised service.

Basically what I am saying is that organisations need a very clear S&M strategy.

What are they using the account for – promotion, contact, information? Is the account going to be active, passive, one-way or feedback? Who to friend or follow? How, why and when to tweet, post or reply. Once upon a time it was the adage that all publicity is good publicity; but is it when it isn’t even your own publicity?

People are playing with fire because it is new, it is flash, it does something - though they're not entirely sure what it does that is useful to them at that moment in time. The problems only become apparent when that fire is used inappropriately; without a proper fire-handling policy or risk assessment in place; or when other people realise that they can use fire to arson your business.

But maybe that is stretching the metaphor a little too far.