April
The Grand Slam of Social Media Mistakes - A Lesson Learned from Denny’s.
2010 at 01:45 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
Whoever is directing the social media initiative for Denny's Restaurant is either one of the luckiest people not to get fired or a family member. Since October of 2009, the menus of 1,500 Denny's restaurants have invited customers to join the social-media conversation at Twitter. Good idea, right?. But there's a serious problem - the @Dennys account listed on the menu is registered to Dennys Hsieh—a Taiwanese individual—and not the American restaurant chain. You would think that after 6 months, someone would be taking action to correct the situation.
However, according to Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable, a CNET report states that the "menu misprint is an error that the company hopes to correct not by reprinting menus but by convincing Twitter to hand over the 'Dennys' Twitter account." O-kay.
Whatever Denny's winds up doing, there are some valuable lessons to take away from their glaring oversight. Van Grove suggests some pretty common sense basic steps that should be followed:
• Fact-check all content during the proofreading process. If there's a phone number, call it; if there's a URL, type it into a browser; if there's an email address, send a test message; if there's a street address, double-check it against secondary sources.
• Grab preferred usernames and URLs as soon as new social-media venues appear. It takes little effort to ensure you're ready for any site's overnight success.
• Respond to a social-media faux pas with social-media savvy. Companies that correct errors with flair and finesse are often lauded for their pitch-perfect response. Those that don't are frequently scorned.
If you're integrating social media into your marketing efforts, good for you, but take the time to make sure you have your bases covered so one mistake doesn't compromise your effectiveness.
Posted in: Social Media
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