170: 5 Ingenious Ways Your Brand Can Respond to Social Media Bullies

Over last month's holiday break, I received a call from a rattled business owner who was desperate for help. He was being attacked on social media by an online mob. False accusations, an organized digital campaign, the works. I told him I could help. At the start, I told him my approach to a digital PR crisis could be summed up from two iconic movies. We start here. The setup is a media relations strategy from a family.

That's a terrific story. We have newspaper people on the payroll, don't we, Tom? They might like a story like that. They might. They just might.

That advice from Michael Corleone wasn't the advice I gave him. I told him this line instead. Word for word.

It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.

Welcome to the Indestructible PR podc, where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help you manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. This week, I'll share with you five ingenious ways your brand or business can respond to a social media bully. Back to the story. To refresh your memory, I received a call from a panic business owner. He was accused of making racist remarks to a group who turned around and posted the interaction to social media. He called me because he knew someone who knew someone who saw me speak at a conference about digital PR crises. And that led him to reach out to me on a night that I finally had off where it was just me, a bottle of wine, and Netflix. But when my phone rang at that hour and it was my business phone, I couldn't not pick it up. I did. I heard the panic in his voice and I got back to him immediately. When he told me what happened, I immediately went to Facebook. By the time I saw the post, there were almost a thousand engagements. On the one post defaming him and his business, the first question that I asked him, was it true? Did you make those comments? And he said, no. So then I told him, I will help you. There is a set of rules that I follow when it comes to responding to any type of crisis or accusation. If you listen to the podcast, you know it's straight from my book, Reclaim, Control and Respond with Confidence in a Media Crisis. It's on sale now and the audiobook gets drops soon. So whether it's the book, the audiobook, or a conversation with me, I'm going to have an approach for how to deal with a crisis, specifically a digital one. So on the podcast this week, let's discuss the options that I've used with clients and also with this particular business owner with his social media bully problem. Online social media and social communities like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have transformed the technological social experience. These social media outlets, you know, the benefit is they connect us with people, they connect us with old friends, they introduce us to new ones. I, like many people, have a love hate relationship with social media. Right now, personally, I'm not using Facebook. I don't want to look at it, I don't want to use it. I'm just not on it. I use Twitter, I'm using Instagram, but I'm kind of, I'm over the Facebook experience. However, in the business that I'm in, I need to know it, I need to understand it, because I still understand that over 2 billion people are on it. When there is a digital crisis, it happens in two places, typically Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is more of the brand PR crisis. Facebook is that customer focused, customer centric PR crisis, which is what was happening to this client. Social media also provides this ability for brands to exchange, you know, ideas and thoughts and thought leadership with your customer. So there's a lot of power that you can leverage from the site. But there's also a dark side for brands and companies to deal with. And one that is particularly problematic is when a brand is attacked, especially if it's a small business, especially if it's personal. According to Forbes Magazine, when one person starts using social media to try and embarrass or undermine another person, even when they both reside in the same country or otherwise close by, or they know each other or there's some connection, that is Social cyberbullying. Social media relationships are incredibly important for brands and businesses. But social media bullies can cause serious, significant reputational damage to an organization. And social media nowadays, it's made it easier to bully. People can bully behind a Persona. So today these social media bullies will attack brands looking for ammunition that can be used against companies or leaders or owners. They search for social media ammunition that can be used to embarrass either the company or the people who are attached to it. Now the social media bully attacks. It may not result in any PR crisis, but there's no way for businesses to know when a social media bully will strike next. Which is why it's so important for brands to have social media management procedures in place to manage social media attacks. So how can social media savvy brands handle social cyberbullying? So here are five ingenious suggestions to help confront an attack and conquer the bully. These are the same ways that I approached to this business owner for his particular issue. But it's also just an overall summary of how you can approach social media abuse. One, you want to be aware of social media bullying. You want to know that it can happen at any moment to your brand. So you must be prepared to respond if an attack does happen. Have someone on staff or have a person on speed dial. In the case of the person who I worked with over the holidays, they didn't have anyone. And it's not surprising considering the type of business that this person had. Resources are limited, particularly for businesses that have been impacted by the pandemic and by Covid. And this business that I had worked with certainly had been impacted. So a lot of them are running on shoestring budgets as it is. But still, even if you don't have the resources in place, it's important to have someone on speed dial or someone that you know that you can call in a moment's notice. So either have them on retainer or know who you can call. All right, Number two, always take social cyberbullying seriously. It's usually done by an individual or a group who want to cause harm to your brand. But first, let's start. What is a bully? Now, the phenomenon has many different names. There's cyber harassment, cyberbullying, trolling, flaming, and some terms are used interchangeably. And others have, you know, been completely drained of meaning. I found online Pen America, they prefer the term online harassment or online abuse, which is. I like that as well. It's not as common, commonly used, but that's exactly what it is. So it's defined as pervasive or severe targeting of an individual or group online through harmful behavior. I like those two words, severe targeting. And often it's not anonymous, even though I hear that all the time. Oh, it's people behind anonymous names on social media? No, not at all. Maybe on Reddit. On Reddit, you can hide behind a name. I have a name on Reddit, and it's kind of a play on my name. I'm very active on Reddit, and I have to tell you, I love not having my name attached to it, but I'm not a cyber bully. But it is. That is a site where you can move about with anonymity, but on Facebook, you have to be someone. Now, on Instagram, it's easy to make a Finsta account, a fake Instagram account, but if you do that, people can look on your profile and see that maybe you only have one or two posts and that it is a Finsta account. So you can kind of hide behind that if you want to. But most people using Facebook do not go through all the effort because Facebook makes you go through a lot of hoops. Same with Twitter, to hide who you are. I mean, they have your phone number, they have a name. It's pretty difficult to do. So never assume that the person is hiding. It's not to mean that they're not. But usually when I see it, we know exactly who these people are. It's also important to know the difference between cyber bullying and criticism. Just because someone criticizes you online, criticizes you as an owner, as an executive, senior leadership, whatever, or anyone at your business or criticizes your business does not make them a bully. It just means they're a critic. And you want to answer critics because critics can be incredibly valuable. It can still hurt, it can still be like a kick to the gut. But that kick is going to leave a mark. And that mark might be something that you've learned, you know, some vulnerability about your business. But cyberbullying, that's trolling. Those are people who are disruptors. That's the word that I like to fall back on. If someone is just disrupting a business, if they are lying false accusations, like in the case of what I was dealing with with this business owner, it was false. That was cyberbullying. Number three, respond to social cyberbullying immediately and be prepared to take action. Never let it sit if someone is attacking you and if someone has said something that is incredibly false and incredibly damaging, don't let it sit there. Now there is a caveat in the case of the person who I was working with. It's a good thing that they did not respond. It's a good thing that his first reaction was to call someone to get help. And I happened to see the email chain back and forth before he got to me. I saw the path, how it led to me and it was wonderful to read it. The person who recommended me, because this person was trying to help this business owner on their own and they were using information that they picked up from my talk, which was wonderful. And they were giving this business owner my indestructible PR response. You know, the first thing, you have to own it. It was fabulous. I have a big smile on my face when I say it because I wasn't even there. And someone who doesn't even work in pr, they work in management, was giving PR spot on PR advice to a business owner. It was great advice, it was fantastic advice. But they happened to mention my name too. And the guy just rolled the dice and said, you know, maybe I can get ahold of her. And he did. Even though I was ready for Netflix and chilling, but still I wanted to help and we did. But the good thing that he did in waiting is that he didn't make the wrong post. He didn't make a mistake like a reactionary post or a reactionary emotional post. He waited the time, caused damage, definitely, because the post increased in shares and the engagement built, the negativity built. But he did. The smart thing is he let his emotions go to the side for a moment. He didn't make it as personal and he thought about the business and he did the right thing. Number four, Use social media management tools to monitor social media interactions and conversations involving your brand. I've mentioned this many times before. If you run a business, you want to have some sort of dashboard, some sort of customer management tool that you can see what's happening in that dashboard fashion. It's very difficult to manage all the accounts separately. I will say for a lot of businesses that just operate in the Facebook world or the Facebook Instagram world, the back end of Facebook is pretty good. Facebook Publisher does make it easier to schedule posts to see who's responding. Especially if you have an Instagram account, you can see them both at the same time and it's and because Facebook doesn't want you to go to a third party, you know, often you'll hear that you get punished for using a third party and I do think that is the case. You're not going to get as much punch to your posts if you go through a digital dashboard. However, I think the payoff is worth it because you can. Your social media manager, if you have multiple accounts, can look at everything at once and you can categorize it and you can just organize it better if you have something bigger. But if you are a smaller business, it's okay just to have Facebook and use the back end Facebook Publisher, which is what this business owner had. Now he admitted he did not spend a lot of time on Facebook on his own. The manager of his business did it and the manager did a very good job running it. They let me in on the back end as an admin so I could see it. They did a very, very good job and it was well organized. So it was very easy to do what we needed to do. Which I'll tell you in the next one, which is number five and that is show yourself. There is a reason why we do this. When someone is attacking you on social media, they are filled with power and control because that's what, what they want. In many cases, as Michael Corleone says, it's not personal, it's business. And in the case of this business owner that I was, who I was working with, it was business. He was caught in the crossfire between two warring groups, two big groups, a supplier and an organized group. I'll just leave it at that. I want to leave it as general as possible. He was collateral damage. He was a victim, but he was damaged the most. But it wasn't about him. The people who set up this campaign had no idea who he was. I don't even think they knew the guy's name. They only said the owner. So they, they ratted out his business. False claims. And he even asked, you know, can I sue? And, and technically, could he have done that? Absolutely, because it was false. They were picketing his business with false claim. He could have done that. But I said, you don't need to do that because again, it's not personal. They have an ax to grind with someone else, but they're using you. But what you need to do right now is respond. And you need to respond with your message and it needs to come from you. So the simple reaction that we had, our response to this PR crisis was one response. It was writing a letter, a message from the owner. It's a couple paragraphs long, and at the top it said a statement from the owner with the name. And it was a first person statement indicating, you know, acknowledging what was happening and then saying what was untrue and stating why they were confused, why they were in the middle of it. But they know that there was this thing happening between these two groups. This person was in the middle. And then the last piece was the commitment to the patrons of the business, which has been there for a long time. Family business. It was heartfelt, it was straight from the owner. It was honest and it was true. The primary objective of that message was to let his patrons, his customers, the local community know that he and his business was being attacked by an out of town group, that he had nothing to do with it. But the most important thing that we wanted to convey is that he did not make those racial comments to that person. And because they had a photo and it looked bad, and a lot of people in those a thousand engagements were absolutely letting this guy have it. They were calling him a racist. They were saying, we need to pick it, we're never going here. They were just lies, making everything up as they went along. And I said to him, I said, that's the reason why we need to do this. And he was nervous because he was. He was. He was. It almost. It almost felt like the Godfather, which is why I quoted it. I said, you know, we're going up a group here. You know, we don't want to be, you know, sleeping with the fishes by any means, but you have to stand up for what's right and you have to set the record straight. We had to correct the record. He never said that. It was an egregious, egregious claim. It was wrong. And we had to correct that record. And that was the most important thing. But the subtext of what we also needed to do, and this is very Godfather esque, is that we were sending a message. We wanted to say that this group, they were sleeping with the fishes. In other words, it's almost like a horse head in the bed, you know, if you know, you know, right? We were saying, I'm watching you. We're saying, I'm not going to let you bully me. You think your group can come here and lie about my business and get away with it? Nuh. Not on my watch. The owner rose up and said something. So guess what happened? Did the group write back? Did anybody in his Facebook post come back and say something and say, oh, no, you're lying. Crickets. If there were a cricket emoji, we'd put cricket emojis on the post. Nothing. And that's exactly what we wanted to have happen. We wanted to correct the record. That was the most important thing. That is not the time to complain. It's not the time to panic. It is not the time to pick fights. It's the time to tell your side of the story. And if you followed what I said, the first thing that we did, step one is he owned it. He said exactly what happened, that he did face this group. He had asked them to leave. There were words, definitely. He acknowledged what happened. He admitted what happened, and then we put it into context. He never said those things. The context of what happened is there was nothing wrong with this person's business. He was just in the crossfire. He doesn't know why he was targeted, has no idea why this happened. And step three, the promise. He promised to continue to serve his customers in the way that they were accustomed to it. He was going to continue to be there, open the doors, and not let these bullies shut him down. In every podcast, I add an indestructible PR tip and it comes right at the top of the podcast, the quote it's not personal, it's business. But it's also a little bit personal. Here's why. When you post a heartfelt statement or a video response, anything in response to an attack, you are showing a very personal side of your business. You're showing the leadership. And when people see the human side, they see the personal. They will respond in kind. Now, I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that there were two iconic movies when I shared my approach to the PR response to this business owner under attack. Honestly, I told that owner that if we posted that statement, that would be the moment a movement would start where the customers, the community, friends and family would come out in droves to share how much not only that the business meant to them, but how much the owner meant to all of them as well. I told him that he was going to have his George Bailey moment toast to my big brother George, the richest man in town. And he did. That's all for this week on the podcast. If you think this episode would help anyone managing a social media bully issue, please send it their way. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. It.