The Social Enthusiast

People sometimes ask me what skill or ability I find most helpful in my work as a social media manager.  

While my background as a web copywriter is certainly useful, and my ability to quickly shift mental gears comes in handy fairly frequently, I would say that what’s been most helpful is my tendency to be slow to panic.

Occasionally, my tendency to ingest WAY too much caffeine results in some pretty frenetic activity and some fairly high-pitched, fast-paced talking on my part.  Which, to the uninitiated, might seem like I’m freaking out.  But most of the time, I’m actually quite calm on the inside.  I’m just being calm at an incredibly high rate of speed. 

Which is fortunate, because trust me, there are a ton of situations in handing corporate social media where it would be tempting to just freak out completely. 

Most of the brands and clients I represent are affinity brands.  The nature of Doe-Anderson’s core competency as an agency means that often for my clients, their biggest concern is figuring out what to do with their large contingent of rabid fans.  

I know.  Tough job, right?

But what I often find is that however hot the fires of passion burn at the "fan" side of a brand, you can expect an equal and opposite blaze of hatred at the other end of the spectrum.  

No matter how much you try to prepare a client, those blazing fires of hatred never fail to catch them off guard.  

Which is usually when we have to have the "therapy, not triage" talk. 

It can be tempting to look at social media as public relations triage.  When your brand has been hit by a metaphorical Mack truck on the highway of online public discourse, it’s tempting to think that social media can swoop in like a first responder and clean up the damage.

In some cases, that’s not a bad analogy.  Absolutely, you should have at least an outline response plan.  If you don’t have a crisis communication plan of some sort in place, you’ve failed on basic old school public relations preparedness.

And social media tools do allow you to respond publicly more quickly than was previously possible.  See: Dominos pizza, Motrin Moms, etc.  And while social media "gurus" will dissect and criticize whatever response you go with endlessly (because it’s in their best interest to keep someone else’s controversy going as long as possible), the general public will probably cut you some slack and give you credit for making the effort.

Social media used in that way reminds me of an old Daffy Duck cartoon.  Frustrated by several failed attempts to upstage Bugs Bunny, he finally succeeds by swallowing several combustible substances and blowing himself to smithereens.  As Bugs tells his ghost the audience loved the act and wants an encore, he can only respond "I know, I know, but I can only do it once."  

Which is really sort of my long-winded and pop-culture intensive way of saying that you have to commit to a two-way dialogue over the long haul.  If your "social media presence" is limited to damage control during emergencies, you’ll quickly lose all credibility.  

You can only do it once.  

The truth is, short-term "social media tempests" like the Motrin Moms debacle and even the Dominos Pizza mess are forgotten as quickly as they come up.