It’s All Social Media Fun and Games Until You Get a Call from HR

Gerry Moran — September 19, 2019 Follow @GerryMoran

— September 19, 2019

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or, in reality, a client, an analyst’s support, or your credibility from getting your social media account hacked. And then, HR calls you about your social media governance.

Many brands govern their social media program with documented strategy and policy. And, there are many more brands who don’t govern at all. They write passwords on stickies. They don’t write down their content marketing plan. They make their CEOs and HR execs cringe with their poor writing skills.

Since clients, analysts, and the press use social media to check in on the pulse of the company, unprofessional and unskilled social media management will hurt a brand, beyond belief. All of a sudden, that ‘free’ marketing channel costs you a lot. Your well-intended missteps cannot be taken back or untweeted.

3 Social Media Governance Statistics That Are a Dangerous Combination for Your Brand

• Ad Week reports 47% of employees will use social networks at some point to connect with customers—which sets up a slew of problems if their skill set does not match their passion.
• Pew Research Center reports 73% of companies don’t have an official social media policy—which is an operating manual to address unapproved social media channels, interacting with the press, and developing brand-approved messaging.
• A MARTECH Advisor post cites a lack of knowledge and training is the #1 challenge keeping marketers from achieving their customer engagement goals4r—indicating that many digital marketers are undereducated with using social media.

How do you avoid losing your focus on the right things to do with your content marketing and social media? Focus on what happens when you lack the skill or understanding of running a social media program. Then hire a professional to develop an end-to-end governance and content marketing strategy. Here are just a few things that can happen to any Fortune 500 brand or small business with no social media policy.

17 Ways To Poke Your Eye Out With Social Media

1. No one retweets or shares your post, suggesting your brand is not engaging.
2. You go viral for the wrong reason, and you become ensconced in a PR debacle.
3. You get hacked and don’t have a plan to remedy the off-color posts from your channel.
4. No one clicks on your post and your social media is not driving business impact.
5. You begin to lose followers, while all of your competitors are gaining followers.
6. You forgot your social media channel password and need to take down a post at midnight.
7. You can explain your ROI to leadership and your program funding gets cut.
8. You don’t have enough content to use on your channels and all you do is send promotional messaging that falls on deaf ears.
9. You use copyrighted material and you get sued.
10. Your post has a typo and you sell content services.
11. A customer clicks a post that links to a 404 page and you are in the business of selling customer experience.
12. An employee mistakenly shares a personal post and it’s a little too personal.
13. You don’t know what you’re measuring. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, right?
14. An analyst calls out your company for amateurish posts and your stock price drops.
15. A $ 500k potential client question posted on your channel goes unanswered and you get blamed for not responding.
16. Someone responds to your post with a bad comment and you don’t know what to do.
17. You share customer-sensitive content and you lose your client.

Do you have a few more instances that you can share about your personal experience? If so, please share below.

Remember, creating and executing a content marketing and social media strategy is not fun and games—especially when you get your metaphoric eye poked out.

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