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The Crisis Intelligence Blog

The Reputational Repercussions of Auto Generated Responses

15 Aug

auto generated responseWe’ve all experienced them. Auto generated responses on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, programmed to welcome new followers, respond to inquiries, comments, @mentions and the likes. However, it seems that large organizations are the last to realize the negative impacts these annoying auto generated replies threaten to have on their reputation.

Domino’s Pizza recently encountered this very problem when a happy customer wrote the following message on their Facebook Fan Page:

“Best Pizza Ever! Keep up the good work guys! :)”

To which Domino’s automatically (and robotically) responded:

“So sorry about that! Please share some additional information with us at bit.ly/dpz_care and please mention reference# 1409193 so we can have this addressed.”

Ha! I guess Domino’s is so used to getting negative criticism on their Facebook page that they automatically respond to every comment as if it were a negative one. That’s kinda sad, don’t you think?

Stop using auto generated responses!

The message here is that auto generated social media responses can hurt you. Social media is about connecting and engaging with your stakeholders. It’s about building relationships and being human and transparent. Auto generated responses and welcomes are robotic, lazy and send the recipient the message that, to you, social media is a hassle and you just don’t get it.

So, save yourself the embarrassment and delete those auto generated replies. You don’t need to respond to every single new follower, comment or inquiry. What you need to do is monitor, be aware, respond to the people, questions and comments that require a response – for whatever reason that may be – and focus on engaging and building real and lasting relationships with your audiences.

Read: Social Media Crisis Lesson from KFC: Stop Your Marketing Messages in a Crisis

Discover how Agnes + Day will help your organization prevent, plan for and manage any type of online crisis situation.

One Response to “The Reputational Repercussions of Auto Generated Responses”

  1. andreas andreou August 17, 2013 at 12:55 pm #

    This example show us how much they care about their company.
    Thanks Melissa for share,
    regards Andreas.
    [email protected]

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