The Marketing Bureau

When Employees Behave Badly on Social Media  
By Mitch Wagner
First Published on The CMO Site

A maverick employee gets on social media and says something damaging to the brand. He complains about the boss, the working conditions, says something outrageously offensive, or undermines the business model. Welcome to your marketing crisis for the day.

Employee misbehavior on social media is one of those areas where marketing intersects with other business functions, in this case legal and human resources. American Way, the American Airlines in-fight magazine, takes a fascinating look at the legal issues in an article penned by freelancer Thomas Korosec. But what about the marketing issue? What should you do to protect the brand?

Among the examples cited by American Way: A luxury car salesman posted disparaging comments on Facebook about the food at a promotional event, as well as sharing photos of a car accident involving one of his employers. An employee at a facility for the mentally ill homeless posted some gently self-mocking comments about the spookiness of working the overnight shift, joking that she might start hearing voices herself. Both employees were fired.

And there have been other, more famous incidents: An employee at a marketing firm hired to promote Chrysler posted a profane tweet complaining that people in Detroit can't drive, just as Chrysler launched its big campaign linking the brand with the Motor City. And comedian Gilbert Gottfried was fired as the voice of the Aflac duck when he posted jokes about the Japanese earthquake/tidal wave/nuclear disaster immediately after that tragedy; Aflac does 75 percent of its business in that country.

For marketers, cases where employees behave badly on social media are like juggling live hand grenades. On the one hand, there's the risk that the posts will go viral, and embarrass the brand. On the other hand, if the company's disciplinary action is seen by the public as too harsh, that could generate sympathy for the employees -- also bad for the brand.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you try to mitigate the marketing crisis:

Keep it on the downlow -- if you can. If you learn about the offending posts before they become widely known to the general public, you have an opportunity to keep things quiet. Explain the situation to the offending employee, and ask him or her to voluntarily remove the posts. A little diplomacy can fix a lot of problems at this stage. A quiet word can calm down a disgruntled employee and get a well-meaning but careless employee to realize his mistake, whereas swift retribution can just make a bad situation worse.

Punitive action might become necessary, but you can always start that later. Once begun, hostility is hard to stop.

An ounce of prevention... Make sure your employees know that everything they say on social media is public. Even if their privacy settings are locked down, information has a tendency to get out anyway. Employees should always behave on social media in ways that don't embarrass the brand. There should be consequences for violating that rule, and those consequences should be spelled out.

Beware of the Streisand effect. Singer Barbra Streisand was upset that aerial views of her California mansion were available on a state-run Website. Streisand sued. Up until then, the photographs were obscure, but publicity over the lawsuit spread them far and wide over the Internet, thus achieving the precise opposite of the intended effect.

Often, a brand's effort to take coercive action to hide information just draws attention to that information, and turns a tiny marketing glitch into a staggeringly huge crisis. Not every marketing problem requires direct action; sometimes if you ignore problems, they go away on their own.

Be prepared for the worst. Maybe nobody will notice the employee's embarrassing post. But maybe it'll go viral, and your brand will become the butt of jokes or outright condemnation on the Internet and a running gag on The Daily Show. You need to have a plan of action worked out in advance, and keep in mind our final bit of advice, which is...

Act decisively. Whatever you decide to do, act quickly, be prepared to explain yourself, and then stay on message and ride out the storm.

The good side of this kind of crisis is that the public has the attention span of a small, hyperactive dog. Pretty soon, a Kardashian will grab the headlines, and your brand crisis will be forgotten.

Mitch Wagener is Editor in Chief of The CMO Site