How to Ruin Your Company's Social Media Presence in Five Easy Steps

Embracing social media can help a company connect with customers and understand their needs. Established brands can freshen up a stale corporate image through social media, while new companies that "get it" are often catapulted to greater success thanks to their social media efforts. But not every company that ventures into the social media world gets it right. Here are some mind-boggling (and surprisingly common) corporate social media blunders that take a company from "social media savvy" to "social media douchebags" quicker than you can type a Tweet.

5. La la la la... I can't hear you! AKA, the Foghorn Method.

Companies nervous about making a faux pas in social media tend to heavily restrict what the person managing their Twitter or Facebook page can discuss, how much interaction with fans/followers is permissible, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, while an employee's Twitter blooper can be addressed with an apology, making customers feel used or ignored can't. Take a look at the Colorado Rockies Twitter page, @rockies.

See any interaction happening there? Nope, me neither. The Rockies are using Twitter as a "foghorn" to broadcast information that's already present on their official site. There's no added value for fans. They've got a little under 2,000 followers, probably mostly die-hards who are following just to show that they love their Rockies. If the Rockies interacted with followers, tweeted some behind the scenes pics of players, offered Twitter-only specials on tickets, and made their Twitter a two-way conversation instead of a foghorn blast, fans would be delighted and eager to follow them. It's not hard to get sports fans excited about their favorite team! Ginger Pelz wrote a fantastic blog post on Opening Day of the Rockies' 2010 season that lays out a much-improved social media strategy for this ball team.

4. Snub the Big Name Blogger. AKA "But you're not a REAL journalist!"

Reaching out to bloggers: Good. Reaching out and offending big name bloggers: Bad! If a company is going to conduct a blogger outreach campaign--particularly one aimed at garnering reviews of products--research and a personal approach are critical.

Sending a boilerplate email to a top blogger results at best in the judicious use of the blogger's "delete" button. If they're a little more miffed, though, you get something like what Darren Rowse did with Pepsi's lousy marketing copy. How did one of the top companies in the world manage to make such a blunder? The same way many others have--they didn't think of bloggers as "real" journalists, so they didn't put much effort into pitching them. The person who wrote this email was probably an intern or an entry-level employee who was directed only to write something and send it to a list of bloggers' email addresses. Foul play on Pepsi's part--and I'm not talking about the taste of their product, though I don't care for that, either.

3. We are not amused. No matter how many of our customers ARE amused.

If there's one thing more annoying than a company that ignores social media completely, it's a company that responds to being mocked in social media by trying to shut the Internet up. If a company becomes the butt of a joke online, it should respond with good humor, no matter how many executives are stomping their feet and tearing their hair out in a back room. A PR or social media pro's job is to make a company look personable and fun in this situation, even if they don't feel like it.

When someone noticed a glitch on Sears.com that allowed users to toy with product descriptions and images to create funny links that appeared to be bizarre, official Sears product pages, Sears could have responded by simply fixing the glitch. Instead, they tried to remove any record of the exploit from the Internet. This didn't please the site owner they shook down, who responded by admitting publicly that Sears had forced him to censor Reddit. Cue an immense backlash that made "F*** Sears" a popular meme for several weeks.

2. Oh, oops, did we forget to create a social media policy?

Some companies lock their employees down with a social media policy so restrictive that they'll never generate any buzz at all. Others go to another extreme and fail to restrain employees' social media activities in any way at all. Gossip spreads at light speed online, and one employee who can't refrain from being a jerk can easily taint a major corporation's image.

Ryanair famously became a social media laughingstock after several employees (or maybe one claiming to be several) stormed the comments section of a blog that had noticed an amusing bug on Ryanair's website. Not only did they insult the blogger, calling him a liar and a jerk, they tried to get other readers to use Javascript to... well, I'm not sure what they were trying to use it to do, but it was something or other intended to annoy the blogger as punishment for posting about a Ryanair bug. The post went viral, with over 500 comments, and thousands of people who'd never even heard of Ryanair came to associate the company's name with rude employees.

1. We don't have any customers using this site. Let's invent some!

Every review site or shopping forum has dealt with it: A company eager to generate discussion of their products decides it'd be easy to simply create some identities for enthusiastic "customers" and seed the site with some positive reviews. Unfortunately for companies that think this is a good strategy, they often get caught and wind up alienating exactly the devoted frequent shoppers they're trying to attract. People who like a particular type of product enough to spend their time writing about it online aren't likely to forget a company that tried to deceive them.

RedTagCrazy, a discount clothing sales site, tried this approach to hilarious effect when they first began promoting their products. First they conjured up some fake customers to chat up a 5% off coupon code (which lasted only a week). When they kept that approach up as their multiple accounts chatted to one another in a second thread about how great RTC products were, Authentic Forum's administrator called them out and they responded by claiming that a "friend" using the site admin's computer had created the shill account. Finally, they topped things off by kicking Authentic Forum out of their affiliate program in retaliation! Presto changeo--a three step plan to annoy and turn off the entire readership of one of the largest premium denim forums on the web.