The Perils Of Being A Social Media Account Manager
I feel bad for social media people. Full disclosure: I am one. Not just the stuff I do for this site, which is mostly just shitposting on twitter, but an actual social media manager/content specialist at my day job. I don’t run some big account or anything, I work for a company department that manages a large number of small specialized accounts, but I am one of those people who spends his days crafting and curating facebook posts and answering online reviews on behalf of clients. It’s not a bad job, but it has given me some perspective and sympathy for anyone who does run these accounts and the absolute abuse and nonsense you can find yourself dealing with every day.
Social media people rarely have much power in the grand scheme of things. They are ultimately just the front line soldiers of marketing departments. The joke is that interns run the social media accounts of teams and such, but that’s not true either. A company isn’t going to trust an intern with a brand’s social account unless the brand is small or doesn’t really care about social media. A football team social media account is not run by an intern. I’d wager a guess that the social account is probably run mainly by one experienced person, but likely a small team. You don’t want just one person with account control, otherwise you might get someone who forgets to log out and does something like the famous Chargers PF Changs tweet (which is still up somehow?) or worse, doesn’t log out on purpose and burns a bunch of bridges in protest of something.
But the life of a social media manager is riding a very fine line between a lot of sides. You want to engage the audience and generate fun as much as you can, but you have to do so in a way that:
1. actually pleases a large amount of people and
2. doesn’t piss off your superiors or customers
If you get too creative, you run the risk of making the dreaded “bad tweet” that irritates a substantial group of people, worst of all being your bosses. If you play it too safe, your stuff quickly becomes incredibly generic and boring and gets no engagement results. If you think this is easy, I can assure you, it’s harder than you think. Companies will usually err on the side of the latter overall because no PR controversy is usually better than lots of them. Not that they don’t also go straight for the controversial on purpose sometimes. The stupid Burger King tweet from a few weeks ago saying women belong in the kitchen was clearly a calculated move meant to invoke the exact response it did. It worked. People talked about Burger King all day long.
I don’t know how Burger King’s social department operates but my guess is not that the guy tweeting those stupid takes was the same person who came up with it. It was probably his bosses. Even Wendy’s, an account that does free itself up to be snarky and mean, is still heavily curated and measured and everything has to get run by the bosses. Social Media people are just the poor saps on the front lines who have to make sure the wording is perfect, send it out into the world, and spend the rest of the day trying to deal with the results in a way that won’t ruffle any feathers.
That’s why I feel bad whenever a team does something stupid or loses a game. The guy behind the account has to sit there and face the public in a way that the coaches or management never do. At most, the players and coaches face a small team of media members. Social account managers face the unwashed, online masses. These poor souls get up knowing they have to try and pretend that signing Andy Dalton was cool and what Bears fans wanted, and then sit there and take it when hundreds or thousands of people use them as the outlet for their frustration and mockery. You have to sit there looking out for legitimate gripes that you have to respond to, knowing that no matter what you say will result in legions of dumb idiots using horrible words at you. It is small comfort knowing that you, personally, aren’t the one they are mad at, but it can still be exhausting.
Social managers aren’t some persecuted group or anything, but if you ever want to be mad or judgey, try to remember that the people behind that screen probably aren’t the people you are actually mad at in the same way that the comcast customer service drone you are on the phone with about bullshit charges isn’t the one who put those charges on you, just the poor sap the people who did put on the front line to intercept your anger. I do not envy the Bears social media team for this upcoming season. They have a lot of insults to face.
The PF Chang tweet is actually from back when @chargers was the account of some random dude who liked the chargers. The team bought the handle from him. It is weird it is still up though.
I did not know this, that makes it less funny but also explains how they let it slip. Maybe they decided to keep it up as a part of lore because everyone still loves it
Lol I miss the days of big companies suddenly realizing they need a web presence and finding out they have to ransom their name from a URL squatter.
Again. Andy Dalton isn’t horrible like all these bears fans make him out to be. Tbh. I think he’s an improvement over what they had. He’s average, but with a good run game and a great defense. He was bringing the Bungles to the playoffs consistently.
It doesn’t matter if Dalton is an upgrade or not. Dalton was a sign of them settling, again, after years of subpar QB play. None of their anger is really at Dalton, who at this point was a bad backup last year, but at the front office, for seemingly dooming them to another wasted year.
It doesn’t matter if Andy Dalton is good. The Bears’ QB is by definition bad, so the moment he signed he became bad.
Dalton had a better record last season than the 40 million a year starter
I mean, I’m not entirely sure what you wanted them to do there? They made their runs at Watson and Wilson, and when they couldn’t work a deal to trade for them they went for the best (though admittedly bad) option on the free agent market. Its not like there was some franchise QB available that they didn’t go for.
Perfect example from the Falcon’s official twitter from yesterday https://twitter.com/AtlantaFalcons/status/1380226183762046976
Think about what the Panthers’ Social media manager had to do when they traded for Sam Darnold
All he had to do was pop open Sony Vegas for a couple of hours over the Darnold Mononucleosis meme. He’s fine.
Everyone would do well to remember your main point in that last paragraph. The person you’re screaming at like a lunatic likely has absolutely no power to change the policies you’re screaming about, and probably hates them as much as you do. Most people don’t make a career in retail or fast-food service because the people you deal with make it a terrible job. If the universe were just, every person who behaves badly towards a low level employee (any customer service rep, retail worker, food service industry employee) should have to spend a week or two in that person’s position, at whatever the “Christmas shopping season” equivalent is for that job. I literally worked retail at Christmas one year almost 20 years ago, and it forever changed how I treat these employees.
A rather trenchant post
unrelated; it’s been a while since the last draw play lateral
My kid told me a great stat the other day.
There was only one team of the 16-game era without a 4000 yard QB passing season (including multiple QBs’ combined stats).
I’ll let you guess the team.
Eagles, Jets had 4000 yard passing seasons with combined QB stats.
Joe Namath was in the 14-game era.
Notable QB 4000 Yard Passing Greats:
Brian Sipe (Browns)
Josh Freeman (Bucs)
Jon Kitna (Lions, twice)
Neil Lomax (Cardinals)
Bears