How to lose followers and turn off fans in 1 easy step.

My long-time family dog may be dying and apparently that makes one company very happy. It's a company I will never do business with, although I'm sure I'm in their target market. All because they weren't paying attention to what their social media systems were doing.

Last week I sent out this message to my friends on Twitter: "Bad news: our dog Trixie, who we got as a puppy some 14 years ago or so, has heart disease. Seems to run in the family." A short time later I got a tweet from a company I've never heard of that said "@mikekmcclure We do preventive screenings" and posted a link to their site. Their was three things wrong with this. One, if they read the context of my tweet, it was too late for preventive screenings. Two, they only do human screenings and I was talking about my dog. And, three, they have the unfortunate logo that features a big word "Yes!" prominently. So, it almost seemed that they were gleeful about my pain. All unintentional on their part, but it made me angry at the time and came across as callous and extremely insensitive.

So, what was the problem on their end? Probably an automated program that scans the Twitterverse looking for key words like "heart disease" and sends out the message. There are a lot of good automated programs that can make managing a company's social media channels easier. Unfortunately, some of them can have this kind of result. If you monitor social media and the web for key words to respond to, you need to make sure someone is looking at the context they appear in. (I'm assuming it ws an error in programming foresight rather than actual callousness on their part). If you don't have time to monitor internally, hire someone. It's worth not losing customers.

It's a new world companies are moving into. It can be very exciting and open up all kinds of new venues and possibilities for them. They just need to make sure someone has their eye on the ball, so they are not alienating the very people they are trying to attract.

So, what do you think? Has this happened to you?

Mike McClure, ECD. @mikekmcclure on twitter.

Comments

[Russ]

Mike, good post and sorry to hear about Trixie. I think you point out the fundamentally flawed strategies (or lack of same) many companies have underlying their social efforts. They are fundamentally clueless. You have every right to be ticked off. Actually, I'm not entirely sure if they're clueless or lazy. Hmm ... no definitely clueless.

[Mike McClure]

Thanks Russ. I do think that the technology and media are so new that a lot of companies just don't know yet what to do with them. That's where folks like you and I come in.