Social media is an excellent tool for businesses to engage with customers and cultivate a specific identity for their brand. But, with a whopping 93% of marketers using social media for business, it’s no surprise that their campaigns sometimes do more harm than good. Luckily, there is something we can learn from one of worst social media disasters in the past year.
On the heels of a massive reputation crisis, JP Morgan announced a “#TwitterTakeover”, asking followers to tweet career questions to later be answered by a mystery executive from the company. In just six hours 8,000 tweets rolled in, and about two-thirds of them looked something like this:
A disaster like this, which will likely go down in history as one of the worst (and most hilarious), forces us to think realistically about how the public perceives the brands we manage. Is your organization in hot water? Do people feel negatively towards the brand you work for? If so, your strategic approach to social media should be very different than that of a brand in good standing with the public. In JP Morgan’s case, trying to position themselves as an industry thought leader amidst a very public global banking scandal led to the instant barrage negative tweets and garnered huge amounts of bad press coverage. The phrase “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” doesn’t apply when you’re already drowning in a sea of image issues.
Bottom line: be realistic when creating and implementing your social media strategy, or else your brand might be the next case study in viral social media disasters.
