Poor uses of social media
There's been a couple of very poor examples of using social media in the UK and Ireland over the past week. In Ireland, it is the turn of the national Gas Company, Bord Gais, for really doing a spectacularly bad job at managing their reputation online. A while back they launched a new campaign to entice customers to switch providers of electricity over to them, in a campaign called The Big Switch, and with this they orchestrated an outreach programme to the online community where they identified 100 "influencers" and met up with them to solicit their feedback. They ran a good offline campaign and garnered quite a bit of online support from the blogosphere over the course of the campaign. They also instigated a Twitter account @TheBigSwitchIrl which did a pretty good job of engaging with the public - the guy who ran the account had a very natural way of interacting with followers and helped organise user participation in Ad shoots and ran competitions. So all that was good. Then the company lost 75000 details with bank account numbers last week on laptops that were not encrypted when stolen (why they were on laptops in the first place is another question) and all of a sudden they put a gagging order on all social media activities. Obviously people were asking questions to the @TheBigSwitchIrl account, but rather than answering them - the only post they have issued since then has been a link to the press release - other than that there has been no communication on the account. They even reverted to getting the PR agency who deal with the company to start RT the link to the boilerplate press release - and left it to them to answer a few of the questions. What this tells us is that Bord Gais actually don't take any of this social media seriously - it was just a marketing ploy to go along with the campaign. And if things get serious (like losing 75000 people details), they will revert back to the old way, which is issue a bland press release and then say nothing, and wait till it all blows over. What they sould have done was start answering questions immediately on twitter, organise for the CEO to get himself onto twitter or some other social channel to answer questions and explain what the situation was, and exactly what would happen if people's bank accounts started getting hacked, and let people know of all the measures that were now being taken to ensure no details would be unencrypted or kept on laptops, and also answer the legitimate questions that people had in relation to why their details were being downloaded onto laptops (by an apparently irregular process that violated the companies internal rules). But they didn't and now their social media presence and reputation is very tarnished - it will be very difficult for them to re-start the good work that was done at the beginning. All because they reverted back to old school "tell them nothing" tactics. I think it's time they started
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BrandListening, habitat, social networking, social software, socialmedia
