Turning a social media crisis into a win-win

Duncan Stephen
Friday 5 September 2014

Six things we can learn from the Greggs social media ‘crisis’

Last week Greggs and Google faced an embarrassing situation when Google’s algorithm displayed a spoof Greggs logo in its search engine results pages. The fake logo was impolite about the products that Greggs sells, and the customers that buy it.

This caused hilarity on Twitter. But what could have been a disastrous situation turned into a win-win for both companies. Greggs and Google both quickly made clever use of social media to deal with the problem in a humorous manner.

No social media strategy could prepare an organisation for a situation like this. But the people running these accounts were deft enough to judge the tone of the conversation and take control of it.

David Turton from the University of Sunderland analyses how the situation unfolded.

Go with the tone of social media and the conversation. While I’m not a fan of some of the very ‘out there’ tactics of brands on social media, I do feel that these kinds of interactions give brands a human feel.

Everyone knows that there are humans behind social media accounts, so we should act like humans and not be scared off by the fact that we are speaking ‘as’ a brand rather than ‘on behalf’ of them. Your audience isn’t stupid, so interact with them with personality.

Related topics

Share this story