COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Pork Council (OPC) experienced the good and bad of social media on May 29 – its Facebook was hacked, but its people were clever enough to turn that in a positive direction.
On May 29, when Quinton Kieran, OPC director of communications, tried to post on the Ohio Hog Farmers (OHF) Facebook page (which OPC uses to interact with consumers), he found he no longer had administrator access. A co-worker had the same problem. It got scary when things they had not posted began to appear on the page.
"We worked together with staff here and called several folks from across the state and the country that are active in social media to help us rally behind this," Kieran said. "We made multiple posts from several personal accounts to the OHF page letting people know that this was not something we were doing."
They also created some fun graphics, such as, "We’ve Been Hacked But We Still Love Bacon," to let readers know something was going on, Kieran said. They contacted Facebook’s customer service and eventually had the page reinstated to where it was prior to the trouble. The whole process took about six hours.
"We’re kind of making light of the situation," Kieran said. "We want to show our fans that we appreciate them bearing with us. It was unfortunate, and difficult to deal with, but is not going to slow down what we’re trying to do."
He and his co-workers wrote a blog post talking about the situation, telling people they had regained control. To thank consumers for bearing with them, OPC came up with a contest for www.facebook.com/OhioHogFarmers
"People can come to our Ohio Hog Farmers Facebook page and tell us what they like most about bacon for a chance to win a six-month supply of bacon," Kieran said. "We’ve had a tremendous response. We have had more traffic to our website as a result of that blog post than we’ve had in a long time."
Three days later the blog post had more than 3,200 views. The group is being bombarded with emails. Google Analytics and WordPress, which keep track of such things, informed them their site was getting a great deal of traffic.
"We’re very happy with that," Kieran said. "The post on Facebook that talks about the blog post has had a reach of over 70,000 and we’ve received more than 2,000 likes, almost 700 shares and 320 comments."
That is important to OPC because it uses that Facebook page to be a place where people can come for information about food and where it comes from. "We’ve got over 214,000 fans on that page and in the last 12 months we’ve been able to reach more than 69.5 million people through that effort alone," Kieran said.
"Losing a little bit of control – that was scary. But we worked diligently to make sure that we regained control and can continue to provide people with the information they are looking for."
