Smart Social Media Management: Learning from Others' Mistakes

We can see a range of successful and working ways of right social media conducting. And we know enough about them. We can find a huge number of common tips in the Internet and a lot of relevant information. But is it enough to have particular theoretical knowledges and follow some tips and instructions to lead your company to great success with social media? I suppose it is not. The reason why is a necessity to know about both possible kinds of outcome from your company's presence in social media. The first one implies great and expected results and contributes to prosperity of a company. The second one is just undesirable. It entails negative reviews,  references, unwanted buzz, and etc. This is due to ill-considered actions by the company's members or accidental mistakes. Here are some more common social media mistakes. 

Anyhow, even if it happened with your company or not, LEARN THAT LESSON.

The matter is wise people learn from their own mistakes and wiser people learn from other people's mistakes. This makes sense, isn't it?

In order to be the second type of people, let's shine a light on several noticeable social media fails for the last few years, which will let us not only learn valuable lessons from them, but also would be kind of amusing too.

Let's get started:

Audi's experience: always make sure you give people what they want

 Audi's campaign called "Paid My Dues" caused, say the least of it, incomprehension and displeasure of Audi's Instagram followers. 

The campaign was dedicated to promoting Audi's new A3 Sedan. All the followers were asked to share their real-life inspiring winnings over adversity. The best ones should have been reinterpreted by a diversity of artists during a 6-hour live event. But it has worked another way. 

That idea just confused Instagram followers, which were expected some great pictures of Audi cars on the Instagram page rather then photos of strange, unrelated artists.

NYPD's experience: don't add fuel to the flames

The New York Police Department's attempt to support its image by asking Twitter users to share their photo with themselves and NYPD officers with hashtag #myNYPD was initially weird. It is no wonder, lots of users posted surely not those photos that were supposed to be posted. 

You can see several posts below as a result of this campaign.

The Academy's of Motion Picture Arts&Sciences experience: Double check. Always. Everything.

Here is a case of an Academy's fail. The picture of Penelope Cruz and Robert De Niro prepping backstage was posted on Instagram on Oscar night. The problem was that the Academy has confused Penelope Cruz with Salma Hayek - Oops!

British Airways' experience: respond as soon as possible

What if I tell you about a customer who payed for promotion of his complaint in social media in order to lots of people know what has happened?

This is the situation that British Airways had. Its client has lost his luggage so he has decided to let everyone to know on Twitter about this fail by paying for promotion of this Tweet, which was seen by more than 76,000 users:

British Airways also failed to respond to the client for 8 hours as the complaint has been posted outside of its service hours, which also did not go unnoticed:

Amy's Bakery's experience: respect your customers

Each restaurant, which appear on Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares needs help for sure. But Amy's Bakery in Scottsdale, Arizona does not think so.

This company demonstrated incredibly low standards set by social media and expressed complete disrespect to its customers.

Here is a few examples of the owners' inexplicable behavior:

American Airlines' experience: automatic responses do not work properly

It is well-known that in order to speed up a customer service process many companies use automatic responses to @mentions on Twitter. But it only works if they make sense.

Here is a funny American Airlines' case when its automatic response to a customer's complaint was not the most appropriate.

From these examples we can see that even large businesses can fail on social media. And as a rule, the bigger a company, the bigger a fail and its spreading. There is a range of things and features that should be learned by companies in order to conduct their presence in social media properly.

The fact that even big and famous brands still amaze us how they fail on social media in spectacular fashion says about lack of professionalism and necessary knowledges of people who manage companies' social media. It can lead them at least to poor results. That is why one of the best way to prevent such outcomes companies should monitor their performances and learn from their own or from other companies' mistakes, that is obviously much smarter.