199: How to Respond When Everyone Hates You: Instagram's Damage-Control

Last week, Facebook reported a drop in revenue for the first time ever. Does this spell trouble for Meta? Yes. Oh, and everyone hates Instagram too. Welcome to the Indestructible PR podcast where we use current events and tested medium PR strategies to help prevent or manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. Who is in crisis this week? Meta, Facebook, Instagram, all of the above. Yes, this week on the podcast, breaking down my favorite type of crisis response, the video response. If you didn't catch the news last week, Instagram has changed and everyone hates those changes. And frankly, Instagram doesn't care that you hate those changes. Changes people like Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, those were the types of influencers who had problems with the new Instagram and they let everyone know it. In this world, when people complain online and those people complaining happen to have a huge platform online, then the company that has to deal with it with the downfall is in crisis. Last week, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, posted a video on his Instagram page that came across as an informational campaign to explain to followers some of the new changes happening at Instagram. But what I saw when that rolled across my feed was a platform in full damage control mode. So this week on the podcast, what I want to do is I don't want to spend a lot of time in the new Instagram feed because that's for another podcast and other experts. What I'm interested in is in the response. Now, just to give you a very basic background for what is going on with Instagram, I could sum it up in a sentence. Instagram wants to be TikTok there. Okay, think about if you use Instagram and let's just say like Instagram to me is the plus one. At a wedding, you know, Facebook's the main guest. But people don't like this guest anymore. Maybe this is the guest that drinks too much and causes problems and Instagram is their plus one. They're there, they're not there, it doesn't matter. But people prefer the new fun guest and that guest is called TikTok. TikTok is changing the way that people use social media. Look at me, I am not the primary demographic. I'm a Gen Xer. I am in the 50 plus demographic. And Facebook to me is, I use it just out of necessity to keep up with people. Maybe drop a parent break in there, here and there. Instagram is just, I just throw things on there. I barely even look at it though I do use the stories. And what are the Stories, what is are featured in Stories Video, you know, quick snapshots of what's happening. And that type of application is called TikTok. Instagram is trying to replicate TikTok, steal its thunder and bring it over to Instagram. But a lot of the people who are complaining about it are not people like me who just use it maybe to lift a profile or to share information. It's people who make money, influencers who successfully use Instagram to sell product ideas. But now with Instagram's new focus on video and essentially becoming TikTok, it's really putting a squeeze on influencers because sometimes they don't want to do everything in video. Sometimes they just want a photograph where they can take a photo of something that they want to sell, add a few links. But now with the changes with Instagram trying to become like something else, a lot of people have complained. Not just a lot of their users, but their key users. For reference, the last time that Kylie Jenner complained about a social media app and that was Snapchat, they lost $1.3 billion in revenue. So you can understand why this matters. There was another Instagram influencer, a 21 year old named Tatiana Bruning. She created a petition on change.org the petition set up by Bruning is seeking to undo a lot of the changes that have been rolled out on the app. She wants the chronological timeline back, prioritizing photos, removing the Reels video tool, which is very similar to TikTok, and the new algorithm that Instagram follows. Now she wants that to be downplayed. As of Wednesday evening, over 195,000 people have signed this petition. Now, many of you who are listening, if you work for organizations, corporate organizations or small to mid sized businesses, you're not going to be dealing with a crisis on this size. But it has a lot of the elements that I see in a lot of the campaigns with smaller brands and companies. You know, we have a person, a victim who wants change. They've been penalized by a change or some choice that a business has made. In this case, a lot of the influencers. When victims feel that they have been hurt, that there's been an injustice, they want retribution. And a lot of these retributions will come in the form of some digital retribution, like a petition, such as change.org, other videos, other commentary. So Instagram did a response, which is one of my favorite responses and that's what I wanted to break down just a little on this podcast. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because frankly, it's mid July and we don't want to spend a lot of time in the heavy spot, in the heavy stuff. I know you don't, and I don't either. I did make a post about this on TikTok, so I thought I would just talk about it on the podcast as well. Instagram, right now we're talking about a billion monthly active users. That's in 2021. We're still far ahead, believe it or not, of TikTok's base that they have right now. However, with the threat of TikTok and this short form video, it is growing exponentially where Instagram is decreasing its users. So TikTok now is a metric. It's the most downloaded app in the world. So we know where it's going. And with full Facebook's having so much trouble with Meta, the parent company, releasing their earnings report, that it's gone down for the first time ever. That is a signal that TikTok is making headway into Meta's base. Now what I wanted to mention was what I liked about this video response. Adam Mosseri, he's the head of Instagram, the video response that he created, I can't say as much that it's going to change the negativity and the negative sentiment and that is out there against Instagram because I think this is a PR problem up against a strategic problem. So Miseri's video is trying to explain a decision that was created by Meta or someone at Meta, and it could have been Masseri as well. But it's a PR response to a strategic choice. So what we can take from that is in many cases, you know, communicators are stuck trying to put lipstick on a pig and trying to come up with the best words and wordsmithing and optics and technology to try and sell an idea. And that's what this video response is doing. Now. Is it going to work? I don't think so much because of Instagram's choice. Like, I don't think Instagram could say anything at this point and I don't think any. Anything they say is going to change it, because when you take a hit to your bottom line, you're going to be upset about it. And that's what a lot of these influencers are saying. So what they're going to do, what's the retribution? They're just going to dump it Instagram and go someplace else. So Instagram really needs to do something. But what they want more probably here, what they need is their earnings to increase instead of decrease. They need to make money. Good PR is a good way of doing that, but sometimes good pr, the best PR in the world, isn't going to do it. So this is an attempt at just like stemming the tide of negativity. But I am going to say why I like this video response. Even though I think they're up just like a massive problem right here, there are things that I like about it. So what I'm going to do is just tell you a couple of those things right now. Then I'm going to play the video for you to hear the audio of the video and then come back in again. And then it's going to be a hard out. As you're listening to this, I don't want you to listen to it as an Instagram user and how you feel about Instagram. I don't care how you feel about Instagram. That's not the point. I want you to look at it. Like, how effective is this as a response? Because I actually think it's pretty good. So this is an audio broadcast here, so you're not going to see it, but let me paint the picture for you. So Adam Asari, first of all, he's cool. He looks good. He's sitting in a room. Looks like he's sitting in a bedroom. He's not sitting in an office. He has like this moss green color behind him with some doors. One of the doors is ajar. He's wearing a yellow feather fitted sweatshirt, which is a very cool color. The long necklace. He has great glasses, these great men's glasses, which as a complete aside, I was looking at men's glasses this morning and they're very similar. So I can tell you just from my Google search, these are very cool glasses. Looks like he's wearing jeans and also looks like velvet pants. I'm not sure, but he looks cool. He looks like a hip, smart, put together CEO, head of a social media networking company that's in a little bit of trouble right here. So he's just kind of sitting up, he's propped up the video. We have text, the same type of text that you would see in if you do Instagram stories. How they have the colors, they have that type of text in there, they have emojis in there, they have captions in there. So they have all the elements that you need to just roll out a very well crafted. The editing is sharp, it's quick and it's a video that is very easy to watch. It's very pleasing to the eyes. So think, think. If you have to capture your audience, your stakeholders or a primary group of stakeholders, they're upset with you and they do not like operations. How you have them right now and they want change. What I'm telling you right now is to head over. I have a link in the show notes, but you a simple Google will do it as well. Watch the video, see if you can replicate something like this. If you are dealing with an issue, I love it. Now, you do need to have somewhat of a camera ready CEO or head of an organization or someone on the leadership team and someone who feels comfortable and someone who can deliver an authentic message. And in this messaging, it doesn't need to be a stilted public relations response, but we want some elements in there that are the stepping stones, the tools, the steps that you need to build an effective response. So you've heard me talk about the indestructible PR response of step one, owning it, step two, explaining it. Step three is promising it. Mosseri does this in his post. He explains what's happening. They kind of own that people have issues. So listen for that. He's explaining what the changes that they're making and the promises that they make. When you make a promise, you want to set an expectation to that promise. You want to declare what that value system is. And as you listen to this, what Adam Mosseri is trying to do is he's telling you that we're promising that we're going to make this a good experience for you. Even if you're a content creator, the expectation is, you may not like it. Right now, we're still working on it. It's not great, but we're still working there. Our value here is that we care about our content creators. They want to fulfill that promise and meet the expectation. They want the value showing a commitment to the people who follow them. And then throughout, he's also doing another element which is reminding you of that promise and reminding that he set this expectation and then how he's going to demonstrate it. Those are the different steps that you need in an effective response. That's how you build an effective response. So take a listen to the clip and then I'm going to come back on the other end.

There's a lot going on on Instagram right now. We're experimenting with a number of different changes to the app and so we're hearing a lot of concerns from all of you. So I wanted to take a few moments and clarify a few things. One is if you're seeing a new full screen version of a feed or you're hearing about it, know that that is a test. It's a test to a few percentage of people out there. And the idea is that a more full screen experience, not only for videos but for photos, might be a more fun, engaging experience. But I also want to be clear, it's not yet good and we're going to have to get it to a good place if we're going to ship it to the rest of the Instagram community. The second thing I'm hearing a lot of concerns about right now are photos and how we're shifting to video. Now I want to be clear, we're going to continue to support photos. It's part of our heritage. I love photos. I know a lot of you out there love photos too. That said, I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing. We see this even if you just look at chronological feed. If you look at what people share on Instagram, that's shifting more and more to videos over time. If you, if you look at what people like and consume and view on Instagram, that's also shifting more and more to video over time, even when we stop changing anything. So we're going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos. The third thing I want to talk about is recommendations. Recommendations are posts in your feed from accounts that you do not follow. The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not know even exist. Now, if you're seeing things in your feed that are recommendations that you're not interested in, that means that we're doing a bad job ranking and we need to improve. And you can X out a recommendation. You can even snooze all recommendations for up to a month or go to your following feed. But we're going to continue to try and get better at recommendations because we think it's one of the most effective and important ways to help creators reach more people. We want to do our best by creators, particularly small creators, and we see recommendations as one of the best ways to help them reach a new audience and grow their following. Now, this is a lot of change all at once. But know that a number of things about Instagram are going to stay the same. We're going to stay committed to creators more broadly. We're going to stay committed to supporting photos. We're going to stay in a place where we try and put your friends content at the top of feed and the front of stories whenever possible. But we're also going to need to evolve because the world is changing quickly and we're going to have to change along with it. So please let me know what you think down in the comments and know that I'm going to continue to be here explaining there are changes as we come up with them, the reasoning behind them, and give you the latest updates about what's going on on Instagram. I'll see you soon.

All right. So did you hear it? Did you hear him own it? You heard him explain what the problem was and why they still needed to make changes. He explained the changes that they were making. He explained that some people weren't happy with them. But you heard the value. You heard the commitment to content creators. It was a constant reminder of what that promise was going to be to the content creators, setting that expectation again and again, declaring whatever that value is, and they're going to continue to demonstrate it. If you need to come up with a response for an issue and it's an issue, that's one of these sticky issues. It still sticks to you. You can't let it go. It's not an easy fix. Do something like this. Give it a try. Produce a video, post it on your website, post it to social, post it in an email if you need to send it out. Pay attention to optics. Pay attention to who your spokesperson is. Make that spokesperson speak in a place that makes sense. Is it in an office? It's not behind a desk? Have them wear clothes that speaks to what they're trying to do. Roll up the sleeves, type of a wardrobe, if you will, and let them look directly in the camera and tell the stakeholder why they matter and and the promise they're going to make. Every podcast I add one indestructible tip. This is that one leave behind tip that will help you build an indestructible reputation. The quickest way to regain trust when you've lost it, in my opinion, is by using video. Words are good. Words can be great. Words are really kind of must haves, right? Like we have to be able to read something. But seeing a person, seeing a leader, seeing someone making the effort to make a great video that speaks to a stakeholder in an effort to win back their trust. That's a powerful response. So we'll see. I will be tracking to see what happens with Instagram. You can check out the post that I made about this video on TikTok at MollyBMCPherson on TikTok and as usual, you can follow me on Twitter. And if you're online, why don't you check out my book on Audible Indestructible? You can use one of your free credits. I mean, after all, I know you have free credits, right? Why don't you check out that book? I would love to get your feedback on that. All right, everyone, thanks so much for listening. Bye for now and have a great summer.