Speed versus quality tradeoff in social media

There is always tradeoff between speed and quality in social media. When social media only started to become a mean of brand communication many companies used to hand write all the posts and approve them with management, PR and Legal departments.

Nowadays the companies will not be able to build a successful presence in Social media with this level of bureaucracy. Social media allows dialog with consumers and consumers expect the response in real time. This transformation has led to many epic fails. For example, when an immature employee starts responding to consumer complaints on Twitter or Facebook these comments could escalate and worsen the situation even further. The next level of speeding up the process was implementation of automatic systems that would create post contingent on various events that could happen. These systems although provide incredible speed and are easy for the company to use often pose significant threats to the company’s reputation.

As an example of such epic fail I would like to talk about New England Patriots tweet. New England Patriots hit 1 Million users and had an automatic system in place to congratulate the #1 Million fan on the spot. Everything was well thought of — there was a message that Patriots became the first NFL team with 1 Million followers, they even have automatically created a T-shirt for the user. However the filters were not properly done and the user whom Patriots congratulated appeared to have an extremely racist nickname. Off course this was quickly taken to broader public. Patriots had to apologize. What was supposed to create a positive buzz and celebration transformed into a public relation nightmare.

So what is the solution? What should be the right balance between speed and thoroughness? I believe there is not easy answer to that question, however companies should be vigilant and careful with any kinds of automatic postings and should anticipate possible traps. Even if fixed promptly controversial posts could be picked up by the audience and media and gain huge momentum in social media.