Mediaboss Marketing

To tweet or not to tweet?

As companies flock to Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to tout their brands, many businesses are still struggling to strike the balance between immediacy and the need to exercise enough control to prevent ill-advised posts, tweets and other social media embarrassments.

A pornographic picture recently sent from US Airways' official Twitter account is a fresh example of a social media misstep. In that instance, the company says an employee didn't mean any harm, but mistakenly posted a picture of a naked woman playing inappropriately with a toy plane.

Examples of embarrassing posts on official company social media accounts are legion: a reference to "hitting the hay" during a horse-meat scandal, a glib mention of "not being able to tell the truth" and posts making light of airplane crashes, to name just a few.

Separately, the actions of individual employees using their own social media accounts sometimes have brought unwelcome attention to their employers. Perhaps the most infamous example of 2013: the public relations professional who turned to Twitter to write, "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"

Where being quick on the trigger can be risky, there is an upside to a timely post.

Gordon Fowler, president and CEO of Sacramento's 3fold Communications, said a quick response to a pop-culture phenomenon can bring much more exposure to social media messages that would otherwise go unnoticed.

"People are trying too hard to be relevant," said Fowler, who recently invited people to get over the sourness of tax day by visiting the company's "Tax Day Bitter Bar" for a lunchtime lemonade. Guests were then invited to take pictures and share them via social media.

The three most popular U.S. social media platforms -- Facebook, Twitter and Instagram -- were conceived and continue to serve primarily as platforms for millions of individuals to connect, but more and more businesses are using them to reach customers. Some 93 percent of marketers use social media to reach a vast and growing audience, according to statistics complied by social media expert Erik Qualman. More than 1 billion people use Facebook, while Twitter boasts of 115 million active users monthly.

Local communications professionals agreed that staying out of the social media pool is not an option.

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