Ways to recover from blunder of Social Media - June 18, 2013

We all live in a new age of social media, wherein you could see sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, etc. have great importance in the lives millions of people all across the world. So, when you hear success stories of social media being used for business promotion and marketing, there are a number of blunders too happening with social media typos. In fact, you do not have to go that far to see a couple of bad decision companies, which have tarnished their images due to certain blunders of social media typo. In fact, with just a simple appearing mistake things turned haywire within the company and their reputation simply went for a toss, which they have build those years working hard day and night. You could be aware of the fact that on the granular level, every blog post and Facebook status was composed by anyone. And as you all know there are human errors and mistakes bound to happen. Certain mistakes could be called as blunders in social media domain for companies or businesses but there are ways of recovering from the disaster. And as time is a great healer, you could end up finding certain alternatives, which can help you recover from the blunders of social media. Let’s check out these alternatives as under:


Avoid hiding from your blunders
Google could be giving panic buttons over Gmail to recall the sent out emails, however, Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site doesn’t have this privilege for its users. So the moment you are updating over your social media site, it enters into public domain regardless to the pace you hit the button of delete to remove the posts. Hence the worst thing anyone could do at such scenarios is the fact that they commit such mistakes and pretend that these blunders never occurred. Committing a mistake doesn’t mean that it is an end of your brand, in fact it’s the effort of hiding it that could be called as a blunder in the social media landscape. If you are seen messed up over social media, have the courage to accept it whole heartedly. So when you can take the credit of all good things, why shy away to accept your mistake. Accepting your mistakes could do less damage than hiding them and this could be one of the ways of recovering from the blunders of social media typos.

Laugh it off but within reason
If you are seen deleting any rogue kind of update under the pressure of your company or your bosses, you still are required to confess your mistake regardless how embarrassing it may appear. This damage control must be more than the formal words, which you have put for your target audience that you have put forth as an apology. Such words could be losing the sincerity and the customers are very much less likely to find it credible, as it may appear like a canned quote for your addressed people. As you know social media is not about public relations, you can choose to be frank with your fans. Red Cross is one of the classic examples for this case, so instead of trying some standard dialogues of apology, they recovered by adding some fun element in it and soon got off from this situation.
Making it personal
If you are actually digging out a hole for yourself, it could be more than like an out of box statement for you and with a couple of days of limelight the things would go right. You need to apologize though, but certainly not to the entire masses. If you have offended any particular person, make sure you put your efforts in apologizing to these individually rather than collectively. However, it may not be practical to respond to thousands of people who tweeted with loads of anger but by putting legitimate efforts by start addressing each one of them personally, you could make the difference.
Avoid doing it again
You may be worried about whether people would forgive you or not, however, the fact is that people are very much forgiving more than what you could have imagined earlier. This is truer if you have been good in the past. If you have maintained a good online and off line reputation in the past before committing this blunder then this task may not be a tough job for you. Your followers or target audience could be tolerant once but not for the second time, so don’t test their patience and avoid doing these things again and again.
Final word
Such blunders could be your PR career stupidity, but don’t worry, it’s not too late or impossible to recover from this social media typo disaster. The above ways could help you in recovering from the blunders of the social media typos.