It's super annoying when celebrities take to social media to verbal diarrhoea their issues; especially when it's Kanye. What's not annoying is when Virgin Australia tweets a succinct message to the self proclaimed "world's greatest living artist". It's certainly the tweet to end all tweets; shame it only had 60 seconds of air time.
Kanye was upset that a review of his latest album had only received a 9/10, so took to Twitter to suggest that it deserved a more realistic 30/10. Apparently Virgin Australia disagreed, and tweeted a suggestion that Kanye EAD (we'd spell out what that means but it's way rude).
Naturally, the tweet went globally viral. A day later the media agency Carat Australia (who had been engaged to handle Virgin Australia's social media) fessed up to the tweet, and apologised (boo). No doubt someone at Carat received a very stern talking to.
These days, social media is critical to consumer brands. The more followers you have, the more sales/exposure you get. That's why many companies are handing over control of their social media handles and passwords to creative agencies or social media management companies.
It makes sense to use experts, but giving the voice of your business to an outsider is pretty risky (refer EAD tweet). When engaging a third party to take on the challenge of making your company's social media accounts fun, up to date and follow-able, here are some things to consider:
- How much creative control do you want to retain? Should all posts be approved by you? That has to be balanced against timeliness, but do you want to risk what happened to Virgin?
- Make sure your contract with the provider indemnifies you for any losses you incur as a result of their posts (think defamation, dodgy claims about your products or services, and privacy breaches). That way, when their rogue employee decides to go telling celebrities what to eat, you can hold them liable.
- Will the provider have total control of your account and, in addition to content creation and posting, be allowed to reply to complaints and comments? If so, you'll want to spend serious time making sure they're on the right page. Then sit back and pray.
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