Since my last post, I have been told about another total
communications disaster ... but this time it wasn’t anything to do with G4S. In
fact it was the electronic festival “Bloc Weekend” (July 2012) who had to close
their festival down during the event amid fears of overcrowding. The event
organisers brought in the police to aid them to ‘eject’ thousands of festival
goers and faced a vicious backlash across all social media sites.
However, whilst the company was frantically trying to deal
with the chaos unfolding they forgot to communicate with their customers.
Specifically, when they took the decision to eject people from the venue, they
forgot that they had authorised a number of “pre-set” automatic tweets to be
sent from their twitter account, @BLOCWKND. Whilst festival goers were slamming
the festival’s ineptitude and complaining profusely about the manner in which
they had been thrown out of the festival, @BLOCWKND was telling them that the
next artist was coming up and posting “here’s one I took earlier” photos.
Unfortunately, the use of programmes that send out pre-set
automatic updates is used all too frequently by companies and their self-titled
“social media experts”. Now, I don’t
think there is anything inherently wrong with using automatic update programmes,
such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Tweetadder, but ... and this is a massive BUT,
you have to understand that social media networks are all about being socially
interactive and reactive. An automated system will never be able to do this for
you; it all requires a human element. By making the mistake of not managing
this process, @BLOCWKND found themselves further angering their customers as
they continued to tweet inaccurately. What is more, when they did realise what
had happened they went silent for some time.
Finally they sent out a status saying:
“By now everyone
will have heard that Bloc 2012 was closed due to crowd safety concerns. We are
all absolutely devastated that this happened, but the safety of everyone on
site was paramount. Given the situation on the ground, we feel that it was the
right decision to end the show early. Bloc will not open on Saturday 7th July
so please don’t come to the site. Stand by for full information on refunds.”
Now I may be being silly but for the life of me I cannot
find an apology in that status. I can’t even find the classic “we are sorry for
any inconvenience caused”. Interestingly, Base Logic Promotions Ltd (the
company name behind Bloc Weekend) quickly went into voluntary administration
following the fiasco meaning that attendees of the festival will struggle to
retrieve any refunds. I am not implying in any way that a better communication
strategy would have saved the company from administration or from their
overcrowding issues, however, I think they owed it to their disappointed customers.
My real point in this blog is that we have to be careful
with our social media tools. It is all very well finding tools that help us, as
companies or even individuals, to make the most out of social networking.
However, we must not forget that these processes have to be managed properly if
we choose to use them. Our customers, friends, circles and followers demand
that we interact with them freely, openly and honestly, this was an unfortunate
example of the exact opposite.
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| This says it all ... |
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