Social media: keeping up while managing risk (International General Counsel, 2015)

Before boarding a flight from London to South Africa one Friday in December last year, PR director Justine Sacco casually updates her Twitter account about her holiday to her 200 followers. “Going to Africa,” she tweeted. “Hope I don't get Aids. Just kidding. I'm white!”

One of her followers picked it up and sent it to the editor at ValleyWag, a technology blog based in Silicon Valley, who in turn forwarded it to viral internet news site Buzzfeed. Eleven hours later, Sacco landed in Johannesburg 11 hours later to a Twitter firestorm.

Legions had taken to the social media channel to voice their outrage and disgust at her incendiary post. Scores of fake derogatory accounts had been registered in her name, while that evening the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet climbed up Twitter’s Trending chart, with nearly 100,000 mentions worldwide. On board a long-haul flight with no Wi-Fi, Sacco could neither check her post nor delete it, while one can only imagine the gravity of the situation as she checked her smartphone after landing – the digital equivalent of an angry villager horde with burning torches and pitchforks springs to mind.

Her employer InterActiveCorp (who are the parent company of some big internet brands including Ask.com, Match.com and Vimeo) had to step in with a corporate response before she had even landed in an attempt to distance themselves from the offending post. On hearing of the internet furore, Sacco herself soon deleted her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts without so much as an apology or explanation, but the damage had been done. On Saturday, Sacco and her employer parted ways. Many questioned how a PR professional could have failed in such spectacular fashion.

This cautionary tale is only one of many instances where people or companies have failed to grasp the double-edged sword of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

According to ComplianceOnline, there are 1.7 billion social media users worldwide. That’s a massive market of potential stakeholders to open unique online dialogues with, plus avenues for new and stimulating opportunities to actively engage the customer.

In a Grant Thornton survey of US company executives, 68% of respondents indicated that social media will be an important component going ahead in business, while only 3% stated it was of little benefit. Evidently, the significance and opportunities on offer are becoming all too hard to ignore.

“In a B2B environment you may want to use it for thought leadership or recruitment,” says Chris Scott, Partner at legal firm Schillings. “For consumer facing businesses there are more obvious marketing opportunities. Possibly most valuable is the ability to listen – it is a good weather vane for customer feedback and sentiment, and most interestingly can sometimes be tied to risk management to identify early indicators of problems, particularly around reputation.”

For a B2C, staying off the grid and not actively engaging with your customer now simply isn’t an option. Those that have already taken the plunge are finding themselves in murky waters, and there are quite a few reasons why this is happening.
As a relatively new but large dynamic in business, compliance models are still in the embryonic stages, while risk management policies remain fragmented and under-defined. In addition, the nature of tracking performance in social media interactions through multiple channels makes it difficult to assess and discern value.

Unfortunately, there are companies who attempt to use social media as a direct advertising platform or shareholder communication vehicle without attempting to engage the audience. Or perhaps they’ve left the logins to a graduate intern, who feels they can broadcast their opinions on corporate policy, with the fate of your firm’s reputation resting on a few keystrokes.

These are the companies that do not grasp the notion that social media is a device for the people, by the people. Corporates are facing scrutiny in alarmingly fast and increasingly public ways, and it’s no longer the case that this area should remain in the exclusive remit of marketing departments.

“Social media has changed the way individuals and organizations communicate with each other, which has increased transparency, but has also increased risks for companies,” said Jan Hertzberg, leader of Grant Thornton’s Business Advisory Services’ IT Audit, Security and Privacy practice. “The increase in risk and investigations related to social media underscores for organizations the need to have a considered approach to social media risk assessments.”

A customer who has a gripe with a company is perhaps now more likely to make a public post of their grievance (defamatory laws notwithstanding) on their Facebook page, where reports of bad services or products are placed in the online equivalent of the old medieval stocks for everyone to jeer and ridicule.

Making an irate and quick name and shame over the internet in a spur of the moment is clearly going to prove more cathartic than spending time and money on hold to a company’s [outsourced] customer care call centre.

Crises arising on these digital channels can spread so far and so fast that they immediately begin to erode brand reputation within minutes. Social media has transformed into a massive risk era, which is exacerbated by the fact that more and more firms are feeling the pressure to get involved in the new medium, for fear of being left behind by their competitors.

Risk management is still in relatively young stages, and as technology and user bases expand, there’s more and more exposure to damages associated with reputation, data privacy and confidentiality. Risk departments could be playing catch-up for quite some time as they are continually shaped by new technology such as the rise of the mobiles and tablets and the incoming era of the wearables, while tech behaviour is also changing, like the Bring Your Own Device crowd. Regulatory measures are beginning to start to change the landscape of its use, but it in itself is a slow, drawn-out process compared to the speed and tenacity of content in the viral digital plane.

“On a micro level, volume and speed makes oversight incredibly difficult,” says Scott. “Equally detailed policies are difficult to enforce, especially when there is a large workforce or social media is part of active customer engagement. Because of that, managing risk is often more effective looking at the big picture, with simple guidelines and education to raise awareness of significant risks, how to react and how to escalate.”

And with any form of risk, management can be applied through the traditional models.

“Make sure all the right people understand who in the business is using it and how they are using it,” says Scott. “Too often different teams use it for different purposes and do not co-ordinate, let alone seek guidance from the legal team on how they use it. Without that it’s impossible for the lawyers to train on escalation policies, which issues to deal with and which to leave alone. In the worst case, that can cause or aggravate legal problems when consumers deal with the business directly.”

As firms look to the big digital plains to seek out new opportunities and markets, they must be adequately prepared for the dangers and pitfalls ahead. Sentiments on social networks are almost impossible to delete, while they can be replicated and shared globally within a matter of hours. Gone are the nine-to-five traditions where an escalating crisis can be left to be dealt with the next morning.

Social media policies should be rigorously enforced with all staff, with regular checks to ensure compliance and monitoring to spot potential problems before they exacerbate.

The many missteps by corporations have been widely reported, but as businesses adapt to the changing landscape, learn the best practices, social media can be a powerful and essential tool going ahead.

“Companies will continue to better understand how it benefits their business and normalise social media as part of their commercial activity,” says Scott. “Legally and defensively it would be nice to see lessons learned from past mistakes: change the Twitter password when the social media manager leaves, ensure the CEO’s teenage children are not campaigning against the 1% on Facebook and make sure that staff communicating to an audience of millions have some basic training on publishing laws.”

Interestingly, it’s the companies who understand the importance of letting go that succeed in social media. For example in FMCG, it’s important to focus less on the sell and add contextually relevant, entertaining content where appropriate, rather than constantly towing the company line. Lose the dull corporate tone, connect with your audience in real-time; simply be more human.

Scott concludes: “Where social media is concerned, the best insurance policy is often having a strong communications team with good self-awareness and a sense of humour. Often when businesses make mistakes with social media, it is less about how they respond legally and more about how they respond graciously and with the right tone to problems.”