OBSM

I’ve been working on a big social media promotion recently. Part of my time has involved reassuring my clients (and their lawyers) that they are in control of the content we create because our Zeitgeist & Coffee system requests that they approve content before it gets posted.

But what about the things that everyone else says? What about the complaints and the negative comments?

I try to reassure my clients that we can remove inappropriate comments and that those are fairly rare (even though they tend to get a lot of attention). For a few weeks I have been telling them, “Approvals for social media are like the approvals for an ad. We’d never say something in an ad that you didn’t approve or didn’t fit with your brand.”

But today it hit me, social media can sometimes feel more like that dreaded channel: outbound telemarketing. Sure, clients get to approve a script and listen in on calls, but they cannot predict the words that will come out of every customer’s mouth when an agent gets on that call. And worse, the whole world can see this conversation AND there is a written record of it.

But all of this just reinforces two very important facts. We have been through changes like this before and the world didn’t fall apart. And customers have been talking about our brands for a long time – it’s only recently that we started listening and talking back.