I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks to share something I recently learned from the daily activity of manning, experimenting and observing Twitter as it relates to tweeting on behalf of an organization, rather than a personal account.
When someone says something not so positive directed at your organization, responding according to the appropriate steps (quickly and publicly — with a friendly, professional and polite tone — and offering the easiest solution or other appropriate customer service response, etc.) in a timely manner sometimes just doesn’t matter.
I encountered our first negative @reply just a couple of weeks ago. I consulted with the appropriate colleague based on the nature of the complaint before responding, and within five minutes of the original tweet, I responded publicly with a cordial and sincere response that included a resolution, and followed up with private message to ensure that we addressed the issue(s).
The person behind the original tweet publicly thanked us for our response, and privately thanked us again, along with a polite observation about the situation. To which we responded that we appreciated it and were looking forward to hearing from her.
Almost immediately after the polite exchange, the person tweeted a request to their followers to tweet a similar message to her original tweet to our account on her behalf — and RT the message to their followers.
Confused and cautiously optimistic that it was simply a matter of unfortunate timing, I figured that she must have not seen our public and private responses offering guidance and a resolution until after she hit send on her tweet to rally the troops in her defense. Assuming she would realize there was no reason to rally the troops based on our exchange, I considered the situation resolved.
I certainly didn’t think or expect her to send a follow-up tweet telling the troops to retreat as it was a misunderstanding — but that was OK — as long as we had addressed her complaint.
Imagine my surprise and confusion as I watched this user send out several similar tweets throughout the day repeating her battle cry (OK – the word choice may be a bit dramatic) and rallying the troops. As you can imagine, this was very confusing and frustrating, as at this point there was no reasonable answer as to why this person was still frustrated with the situation.
Here is what I learned from this:
Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you handle a potentially negative social media situation in the best way possible according to the advice of hundreds of experts — quickly, politely and transparently. If the person behind the negative messages doesn’t want to hear what you are saying in response — even in a helpful and polite tone — their actions very well could have nothing to do with you.
Maybe your response wasn’t clear and there is a miscommunication.
Maybe they’re so annoyed they aren’t interested in your help.
Maybe they have an ulterior motive to which you are simply the unfortunate and innocent pawn — for example, who doesn’t agree that controversial content usually results in traffic to your blog.
Maybe they’re purposely trying instigate a social media debacle, meaning they are hoping for a poorly planned and disastrous reaction (à la Nestle’s recent Facebook debacle) thus providing sensational content for said blog.
The unique features of the Twitter user experience make it very easy for people to only hear one side of the story. Twitter’s character limit and the frequency and point at which other users notice, observe and/or join the conversation provide the perfect storm for mass* misunderstanding and unnecessary attacks.
*I use the word ‘mass’ to make a point, not to describe what I experienced. We fortunately received only a few tweets from Twitter accounts other than the original user’s complaints.
In the end, I survived my first negative experience as a brand representative on Twitter relatively unscathed, and with a better understanding of the risks associated with conversations in that medium. The two senior level colleagues I sought the advice of for this matter agreed that the initial tweets were important and required a response, but felt that after our initial response there was no reason to respond further. Sure enough, that was good advice as a day later the user seemed to not be so bothered and hasn’t mentioned it again.
Finally, although this post may not have ended with a perfect solution wrapped up in a beautiful box, is equally important to consider the potential backlash we’d face in this medium if:
We didn’t respond at all to the original tweet, pretending like it never happened.
—OR—
We weren’t listening or aware of what is being said about our brand.
