Case Study: How Not To Handle A Social Media Crisis

The situation: Last evening a race-related company sponsored a quarter- and half-marathon for runners. Perhaps in a cost-saving move, the company limited the number of porta potties on hand. As a result, before the race, the line of runners looking to use the facilities wound around a city block. More importantly, despite temperatures in the mid-80s, the company did not have enough water at the aid stations on the course. More than just an inconvenience for the participants, this lack of water could cause serious health problems, given the heat.

Although the race company cannot be blamed for the heat, they should have been prepared for the weather, which had been consistent for the past week.

As a result of these adverse conditions, many runners that had signed up (and paid for) a half-marathon dropped out of the race after the first of two laps.

Immediately after the race, the company’s Facebook page began to fill up with negative comments from the runners regarding the race. However, shortly after appearing there, any negative comments (including mine) were being deleted from the site. When I went to support an additional negative comment another runner had posted (before it soon would also apparently be taken down), I noticed that I had now been blocked from doing so.

This was quite upsetting to me as a consumer. After all, this site should be for feedback from CUSTOMERS. If you maintain a Facebook site, be sure to delete any profane comments or spam. But if your customer is factually describing for you something that you should be aware of, acknowledge their concerns and respond to the post on the site as quickly as possible.

To simply delete negative comments (but to retain the positive ones) sends a message that you really don’t care about your customer. Instead, it indicates that you want to live in a see-no-evil and hear-no-evil world.

The temptation is to believe that if you delete negative comments, the situation that precipitated them will just go away. It didn’t even happen! Or that if negative comments do not appear on your Facebook page, they cannot taint the opinions of others considering your product or service in the future.

Indeed, just the opposite is true! If a person is so provoked, he or she is likely to tell up to 20 other people how upset you have made them. Even if someone does not feel they have been personally slighted, just by having a bad experience, the average consumer will tell 10 to 16 others. On the other hand, if someone has had a positive experience, that person will tell 5 to 10 others. In fact, there is only a one in 26 chance your customer will even tell YOU of their bad experience with your product or service, even while they are telling all of their family and friends. He or she may not want to be viewed as a whiner or complainer, or may believe that you will simply, in a defensive move, “shoot the messenger.”

Rest assured that Facebook is not the only method by which consumers will share their experiences with others. In the running community, like many close-knit communities, the word will spread quickly through other channels, whether or not you as the provider of the product or service attempt to dissuade that activity.

Because I was so upset with how I had been treated as a consumer, I reached out to an influential member of one of the major sponsors, a local hospital, to tell them how poorly-run the event with which they were associated had been run. Rather than just ranting, when you can affect a company in its pocketbook, you can usually make an impact with them.

However, in the defense of the race organizer, this morning the race director did send out an email to all participants. He did two things right: He responded quickly and he apologized. In the classic social media case of the Kryptonite bike lock, the company did not react in a timely basis. Through the company’s lack of a response, that led consumers to believe that what they viewed on the video (that their bike locks could be easily picked with a Bic pen) was actually true. Studies show that if you act with a sense of urgency and show that you have taken steps to resolve any problem, you can retain a customer 96 percent of the time.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1hpEBwa