I listened to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson’s FIR podcast (#555, 12 July…yes, I’m a little behind on podcast listening) on my way to work today, and they had a conversation about something I’ve written about before (see #7), but only briefly. It’s time to open up the conversation more, because I really do think it’s important to talk about as social media users.
For the marketers out there, notice I said AS USERS. That means forget about the marketing components for a second (tough, I know).
Shel and Neville were talking about a case on England where a man had committed murder and was on the run. The police started using social media as part of their hunt. The public started to follow alerts etc, and then….well…. somewhere along the line the public got out of hand. They created fan pages for the hunted man. One even uploaded a photo of the man minutes before he shot himself with a gun to himself.
Why am I telling you this story? Aside from the obvious dramatization and frankly disgusting nature of this, one point came out that’s applicable in a lot of our lives, manhunt or not.
Sometimes (and for some, it’s a lot of the time) users move too quickly, without thinking about the consequences of their actions.
There are several mechanisms at work here that make it easy to be irresponsible as users:
Speed
Platforms have made it really easy to respond, make comments, like or dislike. If you can start the ball rolling in a quick 140-character rant – which takes about 10 seconds – there’s not a whole lot of time to think about it if you don’t force yourself to do so.
Anonymity
People will make statements – good or bad – that they might not normally make if they can do so with little more than a first name or a Twitter handle. At the very least, even if you’re identifiable, there’s something to be said about initiating a conversation or making a case for something online versus doing so face-to-face. It’s amazing what standing in front of someone will do to your diplomacy….
Hype
The new “cool” thing to do as a consumer/user is to bash brands in public when they’ve wronged you, or hunt them down to vent to them. While there is absolutely some degree of accountability on the part of brands, wouldn’t you say it’s a little much to sign up for a Twitter account just to find your cell phone company…and cable company…and [insert other company here]…. to try and see if you can get money off your bill by complaining about them because you heard someone got answered by @ComcastCares? Afterall, we deserve a voice too, right?
I argue… well, yes, but not in a manner that cuts them out of the first round of discussions and is just used to kick them while they’re down. I try to treat online conversations/statements/comments/debates as if I were talking to a family member or a coworker. I’m not going to organize a group of my coworkers to hammer another coworker because he wore a shirt that was red and it reminded me of getting my heart broken 10 years ago (that’s not true, by the way, you can wear red around me).
One prime example of this is the Motrin campaign from last year. Ignoring the poor response on the part of Motrin (yes, it could have been better), let’s look at the first part of this scenario: the mommy bloggers.
I refrained from saying this while it was happening, but I found the collective actions of the mommy bloggers to be repulsive, irresponsible, and disrespectful. It got out of hand, too quickly, with no thought to what all of these quick, reactive responses would snowball into.
How can we as users demand brands to listen to us, to respond nicely in 2 seconds flat, to have conversations, to not push their messages on us, without giving them the same in return? How is it that a few angry moms let their message get out of control to the point where a company is shelling out I don’t even know how many dollars to fix a PR problem concerning a video that just wasn’t as offensive as it was getting trashed for? A few disgruntled people started a quick downward spiral into the kinds of depths that no company likes. Was it deserved? I sure don’t think so.
Then they get bashed for having a slow PR response to boot. As I said, they could have done a lot of things differently and better, but companies are still learning. A mark of a good company isn’t always whether they mess up or not, but whether they learn from their mistakes. I say we ought to cut them a little slack in a space (social media marketing) that’s still pretty new to many folks.
More more urgently, I call for us as users to think before reacting so hastily and reactively. We owe the brands we’re “now having conversations with” an ear that’s listening. They should listen when were upset, yes, and we should pause and let them address us before it gets to heated battle. Last time I was in angry at someone, I knew without thinking that screaming at the top of my lungs was going to get us nowhere, and fast.
What we ask from our brands, what we’ve demanded, we owe them right back or these relationships we speak so highly of aren’t going to work.
And the first way we can do that is to stop and think about what we’re saying and how we’re using social media. So ask yourself….am I being responsible?
