Avoid Twitter Suicide: Image from Only Connect

By now, you’ve hopefully realized that a misstep in content marketing won’t wreck your bottom line and that there are things you can do immediately and long-term to recover (and even grow) from it – but some companies want to avoid the headache and handle content marketing and social media the right way the first time (imagine that).

Here are some simple tips for avoiding your own Midol Mom Controversy:

• Hire a content marketing agency (you knew we were going to say that, right?)

• Avoid a company of yes-men
  • It’s great when the team is all on the same page – but don’t instantly dismiss a dissenting opinion for the sake of group morale. They might have a point
  • Are you the boss? Passionate about a project? Just be sure you aren’t loving your idea (or yourself) so much that you can’t or won’t hear concerns about it from the underlings
  • Ask people who aren’t involved in the creative process for their thoughts (is your campaign targeting new moms? Ask the office accountant who just returned from mat leave for her honest feedback)

• Don’t be a Presumeavore, be an Informavore!
  • Besides stalking the market you’re after, consider getting a small focus group together and do a test of your campaign
    • If the feedback is negative, consider redoing the project
    • Track the campaign in all phases and see the first signs of trouble right away

• Learn from other flops
  • With your key staff, take some time review situations other companies encountered. Does your upcoming campaign bare any similar earmarks?
  • Role play and pretend your company was in the bad situation other companies have been in. How would you react? Who would do what? When? This is a great way to get a crisis communication plan in place
  • Need some examples? Some of these are web content projects gone bad and other cases are crappy situations that were amplified by the webizens of social media.:
    • The Motrin Moms controversy
    • Amazon’s accidental unranking of gay and lesbian–themed books
    • Pepsi’s Before You Score iPhone app (which received the hashtag #HowToAlientateWomen)
    • JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day “hostages”

• Keep it in perspective
  • Some people are griping about your campaign. Do you shut it down? Probably not. There’s an old marketing tale that says that no matter what you do, 15% of the audience is guaranteed to hate it. That’s your minimum. Humans don’t all like or respond the same way to stuff.
  • The fact is, you were goofing things up and ticking people off with your marketing decisions before – social media is just a more effective platform for people to tell you (and others) about it. So use it. Monitor it. Engage in it. Just don’t overreact over a few haters.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Content Creation, Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.