Social media mistakes can happen in the most innocent of ways.  Here are two social media mistakes I made with a brand new client that just about cost me the job and also made her think I was crazy.  Luckily we worked it all out and now have a great relationship, but these two social media mistakes are worth sharing so others don’t do what I did.

The new customer is located on another continent.  We corresponded (although not extensively) via email before I was hired.   My job was to re-write some of the company website for SEO.  But before I started this project I bought 2 new things:

A.  I purchased Practical SEO Copywriting (Click here to view more details) by Glenn Murray and it is the perfect SEO copywriting guide in my mind.

B.  I purchased Office 10.

I can’t say enough great things about the Practical SEO Copywriting book – it truly helps fine tune anyone’s writing.  One of the tools highlighted in the book is the use of Word Clouds using a Word Cloud generator like Wordl.  Word Clouds are fantastic and are a great visual to actually see what stands out in your writing.  But ultimately the use of a couple of Word Clouds played a leading role in my social media mistakes.

The Two Social Media Mistakes

1.  I wrote the fresh copy, saved it in my new version of Word and sent it as an attachment.   The customer’s computer is a MAC with older software and as a result could not open my attachments resulting in extreme frustration on her end.

2.  I made beautiful Word Clouds and put them in the body of the email.  While I thought I had explained the function of Word Clouds in the email, she did not understand what I was doing at all.  Especially since she could not open the attachments.  She actually thought I was suggesting that we change her front page to look like the Word Cloud.  Bottom line, she thought I was a lunatic and that she had made a huge mistake hiring me!

It took a lot of explaining via an hour long phone conversation to undue the perceptions that I had caused by trying to be cutting edge.  I now “sort of” giggle about this, but that was a conversation that could have been completely avoided had I not tried to be so advanced.

Social Media Mistakes – Lessons Learned

1.  This was the first overseas connection that I had not been able to at least Skype with.  In a situation like this it’s good to remember the KISS mentality – totally keep it simple (or else you will look really stupid like I did!).

2.  In the future I will always ask how the client prefers to receive information – in other words ask what version of programs they are using to make sure they can open/see what is being sent.

3.  When working with someone over the internet, never assume anything!  I assumed that since my client had a website and seemed to understand what I was talking about she would understand the Word Clouds and see how I had written the copy to her keywords which would help with her SEO.  I could not have been more wrong.

Social Media Mistakes happen.  I was lucky to be able to rectify this very avoidable situation and hope that this post will help others sidestep the problems that I had!

What Social Media Mistakes have you learned from? (Whether they were of your own doing or someone else’s….)