IndustryInsights

By James MacGregor
Vice Chairman, The Abernathy MacGregor Group Inc.

A zealot, exhibitionist or madman has, for a century or more, been able to climb onto a soapbox at London’s Hyde Park Corner and proclaim whatever he wants to the world at large. His audience will number in the dozens. Or less.

A zealot, exhibitionist or madman has, for a couple of years, been able to climb onto the world’s new social media and proclaim whatever he wants to the world at large. His audience will number in the dozens. Or hundreds. Or thousands. Or, yes, millions.

Social media—Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, and all their cousins, aided by handheld devices Star Trek would have envied—grow astonishingly in importance from one week to the next. With that growth comes the potential for an item, for often unfathomable reasons, to spread virally through an enormous audience, variously causing delight, enlightenment, surprise, embarrassment, conflict, pain or lasting harm.

How, if one is a target or victim, is one to deal with such a phenomenon? The essence of the viral event is that many people move it forward in many ways, changing content, direction and medium as they go. There’s no clear way to identify all the players (even if the originator can be found), much less persuade or order all of them to change what they’re saying or doing. No one can guarantee that they can start a viral social media event.

No one can guarantee that they can bring one to a halt. So how to mitigate a viral social event that may be harmful? We’ve seen one frequent strategy that sometimes works. We’ve seen a second that can actually make things worse. And we’ve recently put into practice a new approach that seems to offer considerable promise.

What sometimes works: Say and do nothing. Most potentially viral events burn themselves out in a matter of hours. Even the biggest last only a few days. These are communications fads, and, by definition, the fad audience moves on quickly. (Actually, this has long been true of pre-social media crises-in-themaking— they fade fast if not kept alive by the very people who most want them to go away). But: Even a momentary fad can do damage as it flares up and then flares out. Even a fad can lodge permanently in the databases that contain our social memory. “Just shut up” is a pick-your-spots strategy.

What can actually makes things worse: “Fight fire with fire.” Get in there and mix it up. Getting your side of the story into social media, so the theory goes, will calm the flames. Mostly, what happens is that any response from a target gets dissected, rebutted, ridiculed, distorted, taken out of context, and used to spur new discussions that otherwise might never have begun. There are countless examples of barely-breathing blog wars brought back to life by “one last correction” postings. Occasionally, someone finds exactly the right note, but this often feels more like “fight fire with gasoline.”

What offers promise: Try to connect directly with the people who matter most, and do it outside the social media. Take them off-line. Bring them even closer to you. Who do you invite? You can pick your prospects, but you want the ones who care the most, and they might not be obvious. You can also invite everyone— that’s a virtue of social media—and let them selfselect. How do you interact? We’ve seen face-to-face one-on-ones; in-person conferences; individual phone contact; conference calls, with and without webcasts; direct transmission of documents. What are you offering? A chance for participants to express their views directly, get their questions answered, receive assistance, and hear “the rest of the story.”

This is, in some ways, an updated form of the nowfamiliar “hotline” communications strategy.

Why does it often work in the new culture of social media? Viral phenomena have two kinds of participants— a small number of people who are genuinely engaged with the subject and actually shape the viral event, and huge numbers of others who are minimally engaged but nonetheless serve to spread the event widely. Direct engagement can frequently satisfy the genuinely-engaged, by giving them a result, a forum and/or a quality of information they couldn’t get from social media activity. (And if they’re not satisfied, information they receive verbally or in “old” media can be harder to feed back into new social media.)

As for the minimally-engaged, the essence of viral phenomenon participation is that it’s very easy, very inexpensive and very entertaining. Receive a communication, add a little something of your own, hit “forward” or “reply all,” wait to see what happens next, all in real time. Click, click, click.

But no one is obligated to feed the social media beast. The dynamic of the beast changes when the most timely and freshest information isn’t available (because the real action is now taking place off-line). Simply put, it’s less entertaining, and as a result, the beast goes hungry and the viral phenomenon is likely to fade away sooner.

The challenge of viral social media is relatively new. The direct-engagement response is not new. Face-to-face communication has been a superior solution to most crises for many years. Even in today’s complicated world, the closer one gets to face-to-face, the greater one’s chance of success. We’ve now seen direct engagement slow or halt several social media runaways-in-the-making. We have seen direct engagement lead to useful opinion-leader dialogues that, in turn, favorably shape blog and media discourse.

Social media are new, expanding and evolving. We expect to see new approaches appear regularly. But one thing is already clear: Direct engagement is a legitimate strategy when a social media crisis looms.

If you would like to discuss this article, please contact Jim MacGregor or Rhonda Barnat at 212-371-5999. They can also be reached via email at jtm@abmac.com or rb@abmac.com.