With the recent news this past week about a woman being sued $50K for a tweet she wrote and the resultant backlash on the company that was suing, it started me thinking about legal ramifications of using social media for business. I’m all for using social media as part of an overall tech doc strategy, but this should give you pause.
If you’re a company that is addressed negatively over Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or whatever else comes out, how do you respond? Will the comments or your response go viral?
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re using Twitter for real-time tech support. Would you provide an answer in your tweet? Or might you perhaps say a few words and have a link back to your company site, where you have all your legalese spelled out? If you always use links, will your users walk away? There may be a fine line to determine. Only time will tell.
If someone made a negative comment about your docs, might you contact them and write a tweet on their feed (or whatever else) or a direct message to say something along the lines of “hey – thanks for your input. We’ll address that problem.” Or would that run the risk of going viral? What will your response be? What do you address, and what do you let sit? And don’t forget that once something is out there, it can be transformed into something else for a different mode of social media – particularly video.
I believe that when planning a doc strategy, particularly use of social media, you should always consider legal requirements and ramifications as part of the review. Legal considerations are going to flush out with time, as new issues become known (and some very quickly).
Perhaps the best course of action is to come up with a plan now about what you’ll do if something related to your docs goes viral in a negative way. Have some wording worked out with Legal or Communications ahead of time. Have a process for incorporating some immediate sort of change to your docs, FAQ, Twitter feed, Facebook page, or whatever else you have.
Obviously, you won’t be able to address everything that someone might write. There are regular deadlines that must be met, of course. You should, however, be able to identify the type of comment that should be addressed. One suggestion: perhaps an alert level could be established. Go with a simple green-yellow-red stoplight scenario to start with. If you have a plan about what you will or won’t address in what sort of situation, and how to do so, you’ll be ahead of the game. Perhaps if you have a plan, comments won’t go viral because you’ve identified their potential severity and addressed them accordingly – and swiftly. Will your response fuel the flames or put them out?
Consider a plan that identifies who in your company will address phone or other inquiries if something goes viral (read the article and you’ll see what I mean). If you can respond along the lines of “We have a process in place and will have this addressed and fixed within a (set time period)” rather than a perceived-as-negative comment, a situation may calm down as quickly as it arose.
One more thought: if you run a real-time search on your company several times a day, perhaps you can find and address some negative comments before they even get picked up by anyone. Prevention, planning, quick action: those are the new realities.
Reference:
Article from Mashable.com: “Horizon Realty Responds to Lawsuit Twitter Controversy“