Social Media – Listen, Say Sorry and Move On

This post is not a rant about why Big Brands don’t belong in Social Media. Nor is it a plea that that you HAVE to get your brand on Twitter and any other hot social media property de jour.

It’s about one of the really great benefits of Social Media marketing – If you mess something up, you can just apologize, learn from your mistakes, and move on.

Look at Telstra Big Pond for example. Clearly, they set up a Twitter account before they had ANY idea about using Twitter – as illustrated by their first 5 tweets shown below:

I could sit here and whine and moan about how “Big Business” don’t get it, like i usually do. But I won’t. Because that’s irrelevant.

What is relevant is BigPonds most recent 5 Tweets:

Did you see that? Real Humans instead of robots. Telstra learnt, probably quite quickly, that Twitter wasn’t the place for automated responses. They listened to some feedback:

They wised up. They learned their lesson. They re-thought their approach to Twitter. They got some real people onto the case. And they kept going with it. Now Telstra BigPond … they have over 500 followers.

My point is this. The great thing about Social Media marketing is that if you make a mistake, it doesn’t really matter. All you need to do is learn from your mistake, apologise, and move on. It’s that simple. And it’s just as true for a big corporations as it is for a small business using any type of social media tool.

There are countless other examples of forward thinking brands that experiment with Social Media, but don’t get it right the first time. And that’s OK. No one remembers if you fumble in the first place. And even if they do, you can recover from this easily.

Just listen, say sorry and move on.