BCBusiness

I t's a good bet entertain- ment retailer HMV won't ever forget January 31, 2013. And not just because it fired 190 staff, which would have made a few head- lines anyway. No, what made January 31 a bona fide PR disaster for HMV was the fact that one of the fired employ- ees held the keys to the Twit- ter account—and you can guess what happened next. The first tweet, sent from the company's official account to its tens of thousands of follow- ers: "We're tweeting live from HR where we're all being fired! Exciting!!" Three tweets later: "Just overhead our Mar- keting Director (he's staying, folks) ask, 'How do I shut down Twitter?'" Needless to say, that's not a question you ever want to be asking. Rob Begg, vice-president of enter- prise strategy at Hootsuite, has a few tips that could save your company from HMV- esque embarrassment. bcbusiness.ca MaY 2015 BCBusiness 49 Reddit–the self-styled "front page of the internet"–is a force to be reckoned with. the global online forum allows users to post news, images and other flotsam, commenting behind anonymous usernames and "upvoting" stories that they find most interesting. according to one survey conducted by a british marketing agency in 2012, vancouver had the most reddit users per capita in the world, based on google search queries that brought viewers to the site. two years ago, local tech giant hootsuite discovered the power of reddit. incensed by the company's use of unpaid interns, a user named ryl posted his complaint on reddit on a thursday evening after hootsuite had shown off its new offices to the media. within hours the post had attracted dozens of com- ments, and an anti-hootsuite campaign on Facebook and twitter. by saturday the Vancouver Sun and Globe and Mail had picked up the story, the latter with the headline: "the internet is angry." soon hootsuite ceo ryan holmes was forced to issue an apology–and two weeks later the company agreed to pay its former interns up to six months in back pay, around $20,000 in total, and promised to go "beyond the letter of the law in the future." simi- lar firestorms hit Fairmont–advertising a position for an unpaid bus person–and ctv, each flame fanned by reddit users. reddit vancouver has 30,000 local subscribers: "active" readers who have signed up to comment on stories (typically about 30 per cent of reddit's total visitors). the noisy forum for posting and commenting has come to play a powerful role in deciding which stories merit attention, with many journalists turning to the site to figure out what's bubbling under the surface and going underreported. reddit also offers politicians, businesses and other organizations a forum to reach the masses unfiltered. in last november's municipal elections, for instance, vancouver's leading mayoral candidates held reddit town halls, known as aMas (short for ask-me-anything), as part of their campaign. alfred hermida, associate professor at ubc's school of Journalism, describes the reddit model as "gloriously messy and perplexing": "it's a community of people who come together and do what people do: they talk, shoot the breeze, sometimes spread rumours, but they also check each other's informa- tion." while hermida isn't ready to call what reddit is journalism, he does think that there are "things that we call journalism happening within reddit. "anyone can share anything, everyone decides everything," he says, "and it changes all the time. on any given day pop culture tidbits sit alongside stories about scientific discoveries, discussions about religion or online memes. it's news–but not as we know it." –Jacob parry The Internet Is Angry charting the rise– and the growing local inFluence–oF crowd- sourced ForuM reddit Want to hear more on this topic from major local brands? Drop by Hootsuite's HQ on May 21 at 5.45 p.m. for "HootupBCBusiness: How to disaster-proof your business's social media." bcbusiness.ca/hootup TiP no. 2 know who has the Password You probably already gleaned this lesson from HMV's sad tale: "Get a handle on the pass- words," Begg says. "Much like you'd have good passwords for your email and any other mission critical system in your business, do that with social." His company's social media dashboard takes security a step further, limiting who can post what and when, and can even require managerial approval before a tweet or Facebook post is sent out to the masses. Whether or not you use Hootsuite, though, orga- nize your passwords "rather than worry about who's got what written on a sticky note." TiP no. 3 educate Your eMPloYees No company is immune to social—its benefits or its con- sequences. So "give people a little training, even if it's just a discussion around the table with the team," Begg says. "Whether you're a local res- taurant or a global chain, you have the same concerns. If you're a small restaurant with a couple hundred followers in a neighbourhood in Van- couver, you may not have the risk of something going wrong in front of hundreds of thou- sands of people, but the 500 people you could be exposed to are probably the ones who really matter to you. They're probably customers." □ TiP no. 1 Put soMeone in charge Begg says it's important to not only have a plan but to make social media some- one's responsibility—just as you would with any other important component of your company. It may not be that person's full-time job, he adds, but someone has to be accountable. "You'd have a key holder for a store; you'd have someone in accounting watching the books; you'd have sales in charge of rev- enue," Begg explains. "Social is such an important channel to customers and to the mar- ket. Somebody has to have responsibility for it."

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