There comes a time in every organisation's tweeting life, when Something Goes Wrong. It's almost inevitable, and it's not necessarily something to panic about. In this post we'll focus on two main areas: how to avoid issues like these in the first place, and how to respond when they happen anyway...
Tweeting from the wrong account
In many ways this is the absolute worst-case scenario. You've got a personal account and an organisational account, you've got confused for a split-second, and tweeted something inappropriate on behalf of your library or business. And really, 'inappropriate' can have many levels here - from simply irrelevant to overly personal to something career-endingly dreadful.
To mitigate against this, it helps to have very clear delineations between accounts (obviously) - personally I do this by having them open in different browsers. My own personal Twitter account is ALWAYS in FireFox, my library's account is ALWAYS in Explorer (and the @libmarketing account is usually in Safari or Opera - great times) which helps me avoid mistweets: I trust myself more with this system than when using a Twitter client which can handle more than one account. I also don't have my work Twitter on my phone, as the potential for disaster is too great.
If you or someone in your team does tweet from the wrong account anyway, then delete it and apologise right away - DO NOT assume no one will have seen it or that by deleting it you have got rid of the evidence and can sweep it all under the carpet. One immediate, sincere apology is fine - with the appropriate level of gravitas. A harmless comment only requires a quick informal sorry.
Tweeting incorrect information
On a less dramatic level, sometimes people just tweet something which turns out to be wrong or misleading. The best thing to do is delete the original tweet as soon as possible, but don't try and pretend it never existed. Make explicit reference to it - "I'm afraid we gave out the wrong information earlier, stand by for updated dates / times / policies" or whatever it is - and then create a separate tweet with the right info in it.
Depending on the significance of the mistaken info, tweet the correction again a few hours later, to try and catch people who were not online for the first one.
Dealing with abuse
Sometimes, particularly for library twitter accounts for colleges, Universities or even schools, there is the possibility for someone to decide tweeting abuse @ the library is a good idea. Sometimes it's just mindless insults, or sometimes it comes from somewhere a little more grounded in reality, because the individual feels they've been mistreated by the library in some way. It's quite important to try and figure out which camp your abuser falls into.
Mischievous or malicious prank abuse should just be ignored - totally and utterly blanked. Block the person on Twitter if it's personal or truly offensive, but if it's just mindless swearing it might be worth avoid the block button so you can monitor what is being said.
However, someone with a proper grievance against the library can't and shouldn't be ignored. The best thing is to reply on Twitter (so your reply is visible to anyone interested) and say something along the lines of "We're sorry you're upset about this - we'll contact you privately to try and find a solution" and then email the person (rather than continuing correspondence via @ reply or Direct Message). This means you don't have to wash your dirty linen in public, and it often gets a very favourable response from the individual - at my own institution we've had people tweet (to everyone they follow) how impressed they were at getting a personal email to follow-up on their Twitter complaint.
There's one final thing to bear in mind - when someone says something bad about the library online, you can't help but feel a sense of horror. All those people, reading the abuse - it seems dreadful. But actually, the chances are very few people will see it. Remember, Twitter users only see conversations when they follow BOTH parties in that conversation. So in other words, only people who follow the abuser and the library will see the abusive tweets appear in their timeline. Add to that the fact that most of a user's followers are offline at any given time (for me personally, an online stats programme told me that at the absolute peak time the most followers of mine online at any one time is 386 - that represents 14% of the total number) then really, the chances of any reputational damage are fairly small. If someone with 100 followers sends you an abusive tweet, I'd say the chances of more than one or two people of any relevance actually seeing it are very small indeed. So - don't panic! Take the potential audience (and potential for amplification) into account when dealing with angry or malicious tweets, and worry less accordingly...
In Part 2 of this post: spam, hacking,and disclaimers.
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