By Joe Contreras, Toshiba America Business Solutions – As I touched upon in my last blog post, the engagement element of live social media feeds displayed on digital signage during events for sports teams, music/literary artists, retailers and even corporations, for that matter, can be pretty profound. I mean, what team or music artist wouldn’t want praise from their fans at a live event, right? The same is true for retailers streaming social feeds at their outlets.   Such response and feedback however, may contain snarky comments or worse.

[Tweet “Protect Social Reputation Via Monitoring”]

Given the sometimes myopic nature of fans, particularly within professional sports, sarcastic banter and hashtags are also pretty abundant. Such negative posts and tweets tend to be published at a sports venue when fans believe their team’s athletes are underperforming. They may also raise havoc when a popular player has been traded. Considering the recent negative hashtag campaigns like #BoycottWetSeal, #BoycottPacSun and CBS Late Show host, Steven Colbert’s, #CutDownTheAmazon, retailers are not immune to social criticism.   What steps can companies take to prevent bruising to their respective brands when they stream live content? In a few words: social media monitoring.

This is often a two-prong approach. Companies with a retail presence such as sports and entertainment venues as well as apparel stores and even restaurants with live social feeds may incorporate software to help eliminate consumers’ less than complimentary tweets and posts. Social media representatives managing their organizations’ accounts simply select choice words within posts and tweets they would just as soon omit from their employers’ social feeds. As a result, any post and tweet including such words would not publish.

Because software is improving incrementally, I strongly suggest supplementing this technology with an actual person who has a firm understanding of his or her organization’s social mandate and will select which posts and tweets publish.

While no entity wants to be criticized, I also don’t suggest removing all negative feedback or comments. As I articulated in my last blog, engagement is the aim. Although it may seem counterintuitive, having consumers complain about your product or service is actually an opportunity to win that person (and those following the conversation) over by resolving an issue through outstanding customer service.