Ban lazy social media

Today I was inspired to blog after coming across an article that showed how a PR company had scheduled tweets for the fabulous, late Joan Rivers that are now being broadcast, seemingly from beyond the grave (Source: The Guardian – link to article… http://bit.ly/ZrKSPF).

There are 2 points here for me:

1) When someone dies, it is vital that there is a caretaker for their online presence. Manage it as you like – as a shrine, memorial, somewhere for people to pay their respects but make it clear it is no longer populated by that person. How it is even possible that Joan Rivers’ Twitter account is still live and promoting the iPhone 6 is a head-shaking-in-wonder mystery to me. Heaven knows Apple could do with some good publicity sometime soon.

2) Don’t schedule in advance unless you are 100% sure it will be relevant. I schedule Tweets for my garden centre clients as I’m fairly confident the seasonal nature of my communications won’t change too much. However I am aware that should a freak Indian Summer occur in November or there’s a snow storm in June, I would be on the case, revising my begonia posts.

Social media is a minefield and many, many people use the same content across all their SM channels. This is fine but don’t expect great results when your 3 paragraph Facebook post is cut off at 140 characters on Twitter, making absolutely no sense at all. Recycle SM content – it’s a great use of time – but revise it thoughtfully and use links to direct people to the complete piece if you need to.

And whatever you do, think really hard about scheduling in advance. Have a crisis management plan, however basic, for when circumstances might change.