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Chapter 8 Social Media Information Systems
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immediately. Monitoring can be done by employees or by companies such as Bazaarvoice, which
offer services not only to collect and manage ratings and reviews, but also to monitor sites for
irrelevant content.
Unfavorable reviews are another risk. Research indicates that customers are sophisticated
enough to know that few, if any, products are perfect. Most customers want to know the disadvan-
tages of a product before purchasing it so they can determine whether those disadvantages are
important for their application. However, if every review is bad, if the product is rated 1 star out of
5, then the company is using social media to publish its problems. In this case, some action must
be taken, as described next.
Mutinous movements are an extension of bad reviews. In January 2012, McDonald’s
opened a Twitter campaign to promote customer stories. Within a few hours, it was clear that
disgruntled customers were hijacking the campaign. McDonald’s pulled the Twitter hashtag,
and within a few hours, negative conversations stopped. To be able to respond promptly,
McDonald’s created a contingency plan for dealing with unwanted results in all of its social
media marketing. 46

Responding to Social Networking Problems
Part of managing social networking risk is knowing the sources of potential problems and moni-
toring sites for problematic content. Once such content is found, however, organizations need to
respond appropriately. Three possibilities in such situations are:
• Leave it
• Respond to it
• Delete it

If the problematic content represents reasonable criticism of the organization’s products
or services, the best response may be to leave it where it is. Such criticism indicates that the site
is not just a shill for the organization but contains legitimate user content. Such criticism also
serves as a free source of product reviews, which can be useful for product development. For the
criticism to be useful, the development team needs to know about it, so, as stated, processes to
ensure the criticism is found and communicated to the team are necessary.
A second alternative is to respond to the problematic content. However, this alternative is
dangerous. If the response can be construed in any way as patronizing or insulting to the content
contributor, it can enrage the community and generate a strong backlash. Also, if the response
appears defensive, it can become a public relations negative.
In most cases, responses are best reserved for when the problematic content has caused the
organization to do something positive as a result. For example, suppose a user publishes that he or
she was required to hold for customer support for 45 minutes. If the organization has done some-
thing to reduce wait times, then an effective response to the criticism is to recognize it as valid and
to state, nondefensively, what has been done to reduce wait times.
If a reasoned, nondefensive response generates continued and unreasonable UGC from that
same source, it is best for the organization to do nothing. Never wrestle with a pig; you’ll get dirty,
and the pig will enjoy it. Instead, allow the community to constrain the user. It will.
Deleting content should be reserved for contributions that are inappropriate because they
are contributed by crackpots, have nothing to do with the site, or contain obscene or other-
wise inappropriate content. Deleting legitimate negative comments can result in a strong user
backlash. In the early days of social media, Nestlé created a PR nightmare on its Facebook
account with its response to criticism it received about its use of palm oil. Someone altered the
Nestlé logo, and in response Nestlé decided to delete all Facebook contributions that used that
altered logo and did so in an arrogant, heavy-handed way. The result was a negative firestorm
on Twitter. 47