When competitors post on your blog …
What do you do when someone else walks their dog on your yard? Twice in just the last week, I’ve been presented with situations where a competitor school is promoting themselves on another school’s web/social media. They were both very different situations, and both took a bit of sitting back to figure out - and as always there’s no “right” thing to do.
Traditionally, community colleges have a history of serving their local areas and the relationships between colleges were collegial and in many systems the territory of each school was even strictly defined. However, these boundaries are fading in today’s post-secondary sector and we are seeing more and more schools cross the lines to market aggressively in communities that had been traditionally owned by their competitors.
Even though social media is global and wonderful and laughs in the face of geography and distance, competitors are still finding ways to sneak onto your lawn. The new social Internet opens all kinds of doors for students, staff and prospects to air their opinions loudly, and publicly. This is scary enough for some traditional marketers to grasp, so add in the fact that your competitors can just as easily use all the same doors to push their own programs and it becomes terrifying.
About 2 weeks ago we had a school come to us because one of their key competitors had posted a list of their own equivalent programs on their SkoolPool profile. (School A said that School B was promoting School B’s programs on School A’s page). Maybe this is sharp thinking by School B - I mean after all, it’s free right? School B’s strategies hopefully considered how cross-posting like this would make them look, because I would be a little concerned about that…
School A has so much more to worry about, all thanks to one quick little post that took School B all of 30 seconds to submit. First, SkoolPool runs on Facebook which puts all user content live without the option for moderation before hand (although there are many new features designed for PSE marketing in the Fall 2008 SkoolPool v2, hint hint). School A has to decide if it will ever delete any of the user-submitted comments on its page - and it is best if this decision is made before a controversial post presents itself. If you are going social any time soon, make sure you pencil in time to decide your comments/moderation policies. And make sure these policies are available to users before they submit posts.
Most conversations about content control and moderation tend to focus on content submitted by the audience. Some say that both positive and negative content should be allowed to stand, as long as they are respectively said and are constructive to the ongoing dialogue. Outrageous slander, as well as socially unacceptable content such as promotion of crime, racism, etc, should be deleted without hesitation. But where does competitor content fit into this equation?
The majority of the happy, ethical blogosphere isn’t worried about competitors. They are issue blogs, knowledge blogs, life blogs, news blogs. Blogs and other social media platforms owned by schools, companies and brands cannot just as easily throw caution to the wind. We have competitors and consequently our moderation approach just got a lot more complicated.
The gut instinct is to delete competitor comments. Get them out of there. Be gone. Before you hit delete, stop and ask yourself on what grounds are you deleting this comment? Refer to your comments policy. Did it include a statement on competitors? (If it doesn’t, you’ll probably want to go add one because this trend is not going to go away anytime soon). If it includes a statement on competitors, then you’re gravy. You obviously thought about this before hand and you already have your answer. Congratulations.
For those of us who didn’t see this coming, we’ve got to figure it out and fast. Your website, blogs and social media profiles are your marketing pieces. You can’t control the message the way you can in a broadcast campaign, but it’s still marketing. It would be unacceptable for your competitors to paint over your signage with their own logos. And it is frowned on to slam a competitor’s product outright in a television ad. Taking this approach, your competitor was out of line and you are welcome to go ahead with delete. Just make sure your new decision is added to the comments policy.
Normally I recommend that you contact a user before deleting their comment. In this situation, I’ll leave it up to you whether you let them know that you nixed their post.
I’ll just throw this out there for spice - depending on what your competitor posted, you might actually be able to redirect the negative light on them for poor behavior - by leaving their little attempt at attacking you up for the world to see. Your community might also put this person in their place before you even get a chance to see the comment. This depends on how much traffic your page gets - and how active its visitors are - and whether your visitors are supporters, critics or undecided. If you’ve got fanatics, I’d say leave the comment live and let them start shredding it to bits.
The other situation we looked at this week was when a competitor advertised one of its grad programs on a community that was related to your school, but run by a private individual rather than yourself. This is where leaving it live gets a little more likely. First, you can’t delete it. If the comment is going to come down, you’ll have to ask the page’s owner to do it for you - and they might say no. Second, whether or not the owner goes along with the whole deleting thing, your request says that you feel threatened by the post and that possibly you are making requests like this on how many other websites as well? You may not be threatened, you may just be offended, but the page owner doesn’t know that. All they know is that you want that content out of there.
Do you even have the right to request a delete? In my first case (School A/B), one school was promoting its undergrad programs on the page of another undergrad institution. In this second situation, School B is promoting related graduate programs on a community of undergrad alumni. Obviously you want your grads to continue their education with you, if you have grad programming available, but students don’t always do what you want and a lot of alumni choose to experience another campus for their graduate degrees - whether for change, or just because the program happens to be more attractive than your equivalent. Your alumni may actually find your competitor’s post interesting. All they are concerned about is making yet another decision between schools, and knowing the available options is definitely part of that. Also, your school might not even have an equivalent grad program for them to consider - so is the competitor even actually “competing” with you?
After sitting on this for a few days, I can tell you what I would do - but I won’t say it’s the right answer, because the social media rulebook has yet to be printed. If your school has an equivalent program, consider adding your own post to the community - and even contacting the community administrator privately and seeing if they will consider adding their own voice to your school’s information (it looks so much better from a peer …). If you have no equivalent program, and your competitor’s post was respectfully written - and possibly actually helpful to the community members - then I’d say bite your tongue.
The spice approach is to go one step further and even submit a post that says very graciously that yes, School B has this program and that your grads tend to do well in it (if that is the case). Then add relevant information about your own graduate programs and encourage the community members to talk to you about the possibilities. Confident, polite, open, professional.
How is your school handling these types of situations? We’re all learning as we go here, and the rules are changing every day - it would be great to hear about your experiences.
Thanks for staying with me through the long read!
Melissa Cheater
eStrategy Consultant, Education Marketing
Academica Group Inc.
Full Cycle Marketing for Higher EducationTM
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Add comment June 20th, 2008
