Calming your Critics: How to respond to an online activist group

All over the Internet, public and private companies are discovering that they're being attacked by a new type of customer, consumer or member. Online, it is the online activist. With the ease of communicating through social media, these attackers are taking to Facebook to build community of unsatisfied customers. It's wreaking havoc on the company's messaging, PR plans and business plans. What these organizations need is a plan of action to effectively address the issues and being brought to light, whether accurate or not. If they're activists or customers who may be right, you will need an action plan. That action plan on this week's episode of the Confident Communications podcast. Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast that reveals the best practices helping leaders become indestructible in today's digital age and crisis proof their organizations. You can head on over to the podcast website, that's confident communications podcast.com or you can find the same page on my website molly mcpherson.com podcast and there you will find a button. It says, ask Molly. Send in a question for Molly to answer on any upcoming podcast episode. Molly, of course, course is me. And the reason why I added this button online is because I get asked all the time questions about the podcast or things that were happening. Now, I was reminded to mention this button because I had a bit of a buzzy week last weekend. I was in a workshop, like an MBA Streetwise MBA workshop, and we had to introduce ourselves to this little mini cohort that we were in. And the person sitting next to me, once I introduced my name, he said, oh my gosh, I listen to your podcast. How crazy, right? That he shows up sitting right next to me. And then on a flight this week, I'm chatting next to a seatmate, chatting about where he works, and we're talking and then he looks and he has this moment of recognition and he says, you're Molly McPherson. I read your email. I mean, how crazy is that? On a flight from Minneapolis to Indiana. But it was a great week because it's great feedback to hear that people are listening, but more important that it's helping them and they're understanding what my message is. And it's all about how to handle these online communications, the environment that we're in, and to help people, especially leaders, become more comfortable in the online space, the digital space, and social media. Now, the second part of the buzzy week said I had a number of people reach out to me about one particular story that happened last week that falls directly into my wheelhouse. And I want to thank my listeners and past attendees of My talks who wanted me to be aware of this story. And special shout out to Kyle who alerted me on Twitter with a dm. Love that. That's a direct message in Twitter speak. Kyle is a board president of an electric cooperative in the state where the story got its legs in Iowa. So before we jump into today's episode, lets talk about Carson King. Carson made a sign for college game day's visit to Ames a few weeks ago asking viewers to send beer money to his Venmo account. Get up here. Yeah, but the 24 year old received more than enough for a 30 pack. The rest is for the kids. The $2 million and still counting. Two weeks ago I didn't know Carson King from, you know, Johnny Carson, but you know, a guy with some sign at Sports Sports center and next thing.

You know there's $2 million that's been raised.

That was the head coach of the University of Iowa describing one crazy week where college football collided with social media. So quick recap. It started in Ames, Iowa on an ESPN college game day broadcast where one sign described my work in a nutshell. We had former Iowa State student Carson King. He held up a sign asking people to send him beer to his Venmo account. Very, very millennial. And many people did. He raised over a million dollars that he ended up sending to the University of Iowa Stead Family Hospital, Children's Hospital and Anheuser Busch Bully for them partnered with King to match the donations. That was smart. Oh, but then it got bad. It got very meta. A reporter from the Des Moines Register with a lot of time on his hands apparently dug up racist and offensive tweets that King had sent eight years prior when he was 16. Now this was quasi smart because if you listen to this podcast, I talk about reporters digging up old social media posts all the time. I mean, it is a thing. It's called reporting. I spoke about it in episode 25, why Major League Baseball Hits a Home Run Marketing to fans. I had mentioned a football example when Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray won the Heisman Trophy and then had to answer to his offensive tweets from his teenage years. Murray did apologize and then was a first round draft pick and now plays for the Arizona Cardinals. The reporter though, in this case in my opinion, was just, you know, doing his due diligence. What wasn't so smart is he was while he was doing his due diligence on Carson King, he failed to mention or delete his racist and offensive tweets that he had. If you scroll back into his files so then, as of last Thursday night, the Des Moines Register announced it had fired the reporter, and they had to write an editorial. Their editorial starts with, we've heard from hundreds of you. I think it would be a lot more than that about our Carson King coverage. We took appropriate action because there's nothing more important than having the reader's trust. Now, the editorial had a lot of verbiage, a lot of language that I tend to sprinkle in my work. So I love how this was written, because it really is written for the moment. They wrote, we hear you, you're angry, and here's what we're doing about it now, they didn't quite apologize, but they talked about the action that they were taking because they want to gain back the reader's trust. They want to be as transparent as possible. So it's all language that I sprinkle in my writing, my email, my podcast, my workshops, any talk I get. Now, the big takeaway from this entire story that I love the most was Carson King, because Carson King certainly was of the moment. He did a wonderful thing. So he had a silly millennial Bruh gesture by putting a Venmo address, you know, on camera, which is great, you know, and it worked, no surprise. And he raised all this money, and he did the right thing with that money, and he donated it to children, to a children's hospital. But when he was found out, instead of throwing a fit and fighting about it and getting mad and pouting, he decided to own up to it, and he apologized. In other words, he followed the apology playbook that I discussed in last week's episode. Sorry, not sorry, apologizing. In the age of digital, it was remarkable that this story was happening as this podcast was being published. It's about acknowledging, accepting, apologizing for your actions, putting it into context, and then the plans and changes and promises that you'll make. The reason why Carson King came out the victor was in his response. Take a listen.

It was brought to my attention by a reporter for the Des Moines Register. And once he pointed it out and I went back and looked at it, I was, you know, I was really upset with myself.

That was Carson King acknowledging what had happened and his role in it. Next he got the chance to put it all into context.

Obviously, you know, I've made mistakes in my past. You know, everyone has. And, you know, I think. I really hope people see that, you know, at this point in my life, I've. I'm grown. I'm, you know, more than, you know, I'm Caring and I'm generous and I just, you know, I hope that's what people focus on. I know there's a lot of people that have been looking up to me lately and I don't want this in any way to affect what's going on.

With the hospital and then the plans and changes and promises he was going to make. This is where you can clean up your image. This is where the reputation rehab begins.

Be more sensitive, you know, think about how this may affect you down the road, may affect how people view you, may affect what other people feel. Really, you know, I just smack myself in the back of the head and you know, know, say, think right. I hope that people can look past everything, you know, again. Like eight years ago I was, you know, I was just a little high school kid, you know, trying to make my friends laugh and, you know, now I've grown into a guy that I think a lot of people can look up to and, you know, hopefully continue to work with and, you know, make differences in lives going forward.

And because of that apology, I believe Carson King was the victor. The Des Moines Register and Anheuser Busch, they likely wanted to do the right thing. They likely had counsel coming in and telling them what to do. I highly suspect there was no one in public relations who has a strong social media presence that chimed in. Or they may have chimed in, but they weren't listened to. They became the villains of the story. The reporter should have used better judgment about digging up the old tweets on Carson King, but frankly, I don't think he deserved to be fired because he was doing what reporters are required to do when they do a profile. Again, that's his due diligence. You can find out a lot about people from their public social media profiles. It will be interesting to see the next reporter who tries to uncover tweets. So, yes, the reporter screwed up, but it got past the editors. And I think it's unfair that one person lost his job. The editor should be standing up more for the reporter as well. But also a lesson learned is that big companies and organizations need to stop these knee jerk reactions to a couple posts on social media. Bring in counsel who understands the language of social media. This is a great lesson for anyone who runs a business runs their own business. You can't get a read on the accurate sentiment of the public or your consumers if you don't have a person who has a strong presence on social media. Chime in. People who are on social media, a lot can read sentiment and they can read it accurately. So be sure to listen to those people. So meanwhile Carson King and his $2 million won the support of Iowa fans, the support of Iowans, all the lawmakers in Iowa, a nation of bruhs who love that the little guy won. The Children's hospital has a $2 million of beer money and Carson King has a beer named after him. And what 24 year old wouldn't want that? Now to the Podcast Calming the Critics this episode is sponsored by the Confident Leader Network. It's the place for learning how to be an indestructible leader when communicating in the modern age. All from the comfort of your home and office. We kicked off the network two months ago, so now we have trainings on authentic communication for leaders and how to use LinkedIn for leaders. I had an amazing conversation with Crystal Hicks from job talk about LinkedIn last month. It's LinkedIn fast and easy and you can watch it over at the Confident Leader Network. So you can head on over to the confidentleader.network website or my website, mollymcpherson.com you can download the monthly workbooks, you can watch the video, and you can participate in the monthly Ask the Expert webinar calls. The network has annual monthly membership, so if you join annually though, you will have access to an online course called Calm the Critics. How to protect your organization from the newest line of attacks online activists. It's a nine module course with video lessons and a workbook. Now, just so you know, the day rate for this workshop is over $4,000, but you can have access it now with the CLN founders rate for 2019. The rates are going to go up in 2020, but right now at our founders rate that you can find online at the website, you can have access to all of the lessons, including this course, Calm the Critics. This month's training falls under the category of Online Reputation Calming the Critics how to Respond to an Online Attack when your business has an online presence, it is bound to happen. A customer is less than satisfied and and leaves a one star bad review on your Facebook page or on Yelp or on Google. Or someone leaves a negative comment on one of your business posts on Facebook or LinkedIn, you're not going to see it on LinkedIn as much. But Facebook? Oh boy, that's where you're going to see all the heat. Staying off the Internet doesn't help, it just allows your customers the opportunity to have a conversation about you without you being a part of that conversation and ignoring or deleting the negative reviews and comments is just as damaging as is going on the defensive in an effort to prove that you did nothing wrong. You've seen those posts where the owner or the manager will hop on and start attacking the person who is leaving a negative review. Now, it's hard to read something negative about a service or product that you've literally poured your blood, sweat and tears into. Or maybe you just work for a company that you are giving your all every day. You're showing up to work and you have some unknown person blasting you about your work. But the most important thing to do is to respond appropriately so that one bad review doesn't explode into a virtual fight between you and the reviewer. While that might make for entertaining reading for your competition, which it does for me, it's no way to run a successful business or to maintain your credibility if you work for an organization or if you run an organization the two topics We're Going to Speak about Today Too many business leaders and executives don't know enough about the online world to respond appropriately to an online attack. And also living in the culture of defensiveness. I call it the call out culture. But we also live in a world where everything you do and say likely will come back to haunt you. All right, You've seen the media stories about CEOs and other leaders who fly off the handle when they're criticized online. They respond defensively, the response goes public, and not in a good way. There are so many stories about these leaders. You have Uber, Travis Kalanick. You have Elon Musk. Elon Musk is now dealing with claims that he's ready to abandon his role as a Tesla CEO and chairman. And part of that is because a lot of people are calling him out for his choices that he makes as a leader or showing up on an interview while getting high. Then there's Tony Hayward. And I loathe mentioning the Tony Hayward example because so many crisis folks love to bring up the Tony Hayward example, but it does fit in here perfectly. In 2010. His response? He works for BP and their involvement in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, where he told a reporter, we're sorry for the massive disruption it caused your lives. There's no one who wants this thing over more than I do. I'd like my life back. Another example. Not so much a leader, but an athlete. That was certainly in the news. Football player Antonio Brown. So after he was released by the Raiders and picked up by the New England Patriots and me for my fantasy football team, he was let go for allegations of sexual and personal misconduct. Now Brown wasn't let go by the Patriots for the sexual and personal misconduct that was levied against them initially. But the threatening messages that he sent to one of the women, that's what finally got him cut. And the first thing that Brown did was went on a Twitter rant on a Sunday and @AB said on Twitter I will not be playing in the NFL anymore. These owners can cancel deals, do whatever they want at any time. We will see if the NFLPA hold them accountable. Sad they just can't void guarantees anytime going on 40 million two months. We'll see if they pay up. Explanation Point that tweet has been deleted and AB Antonio Brown ends up thanking the Patriots. I think someone got to him. His manager probably set him down his agent and said don't do this. At any rate, you can hear about similar episodes where I talk about this. Episode 31 A Crisis Case Study how to respond to media attacks Tony Robbins did the same thing. He attacked the press. Episode 27 Yelp I got a bad review. How to keep your cool and when responding to bad reviews I talk about it a lot because it is so prevalent now. What is the solution when someone does attack you online? It is important to have a plan in place. You can call it a response plan. You may not want to call it a crisis communications plan because that means you're already in crisis and we don't want that to have happen. But responding to an issue is critical. You need to know precisely who your spokespeople are when someone rises up against you online. You have to have the correct messaging in place for any scenario and you need to know what your objectives are. You need to know who your key audiences are and you need to have your community in place ahead of time. Now it's critical to know as soon as you see one of these Facebook groups appear about your organization, you need to have a plan for it. And the first thing you can't do is just assume nothing's going to happen to it. Now how do you know that you have a problem? Well one, if any group exists against your organization, how do you know it's targeted against your organization? Well, you're going to hear about it in the summary in the about section. They're going to say, well we are directly targeting this organization for this reason. Usually the name of the page on Facebook has something to do with your organization and they use words, words language like take back or Customers unite. Some type of fired up language that is telling you as the company that we're coming after you but also is something that charges up other people to get the. It's like this grassroots spread where these online activists want to build momentum and community to rise up to make change. Okay, let's put this scenario into context. The place where I first noticed this idea of the online activists attacking an organization online took place with a utility. It's an iou, an independently owned utility. So big business happened to be my utility and I happened to notice this group on Facebook because of the Facebook AI. They probably assumed that I was rightfully assumed that I was a customer and wanted to give me information about this Facebook page, which I stumbled upon. It was a public page, meaning anyone could see it. And it was started by a woman who was very upset with her bill. Now, when I give talks about these online activists, and you'll note it in this training as well, a lot of these Facebook activists do not come in like some national organization activist group like Greenpeace or PETA. It's not like that. It's usually a customer, a very upset customer who, who feels very, very upset about money, bills being overcharged, unfair payment for service that was not rendered. More people use Facebook during the day by a specific gender. Can you guess that gender? Women. Women especially. If they're stay at home moms or they're not working, they tend to get fired up during the day. And I'm noticing these peaks when I look at these sites between the hours of 1 o' clock and 3 o' clock for a lot of stay at home moms, those hours are nap time hours. Those are the hours that you put your kids down after lunch. And what do you do? You head straight to social media. And if you got a beef against a company, that's where they're going to hear it. And that's where I see it happen time and time again. So we're not talking about a big money activist. We're talking about your customer. And a very irate one at that. So when you need to respond, the first thing that you have to do, you can't ignore it. Because people who feel powerlessness are the ones that are going to feel the angriest at you. They're the ones that are going to create Facebook pages against your organization. So as I mentioned, what do you do when you have a plan in place? Now it's time to execute a plan. What does your plan have? 1. You want to develop a problem statement that relates to the threat at hand. Identify who you need to speak to right now. So who initiated the attack? Who was listening to the narrative. You want to develop your messaging for this particular incident, and you want to speak in a way that you will be heard publicly. Okay, what does all this mean? If you have a group that is attacking you online? And again, the attack could be very deliberate, where they're naming names, they may have a mole inside, where they're putting out information, or where they may have financial documents, like they are really out to get you. And a question that I get asked like, well, what do they want? What do they want? Well, you just gotta read the Facebook page. Usually they want leadership kicked out of their position, or they want a board of directors to be turned over. They want to bring in new directors when the election happens. They want to put up their own candidates to come into the board. What they want is change. Now, it's critical here at this point, if you're a leader or if you are running any type of messaging or a program in response to this is to remember this. These people are not the enemy. Okay? They're not the common enemy of the organization. I always tell my clients to look at them as people who are helping you. It's like free research. It's a focus group. You have a group of people that are telling you precisely what you're doing wrong. They are handing over the playbook essentially for you to. To work on a plan. So whatever the problem statement is, it's just what their problem is and identifying who you need to speak to. When you craft the avatar of the person that you need to speak to your customer, craft it with the person that started the page or the most vocal person on the Facebook page right around her. And I'm deliberately using the word her. Speak to her. Because if you speak to her, you're going to be speaking to everyone. Now, you don't want to, like, speak to her by name, but you get the idea. She's an avatar. She's an amalgamation of the customers that are upset and have a problem against her organization. So you want to develop your messaging around the incident or whatever they're concerned about. It could be high rates, it could be poor service, but you also want to develop a messaging that it is spoken in a language that your customers are using. This is not the time for corporate speak. It's not the time to have jumbled language, legalese language, that's going to confuse or intimidate these people. You want to speak to them on your level, which is just common language, person to person, and speak that message in a way that you're heard publicly. If Someone is criticizing your organization online. So it could be any of the review sites, Yelp, Google, whatever it is, Twitter. But specifically, I'm talking about, about these Facebook pages, where they can gather more momentum because it's actually a group. It's either a public or a private group page. Facebook just changed their settings. Now where you're either public or private. They used to have secret groups. Now it's only public or private. Most of these groups may start out private, but they're. They're quickly going to shift to public so everyone can see it. Back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, these would be hate sites, hate websites that were created to target an organization or big business. Dell Computers dealt with it, AOL dealt with it. Comcast Cable dealt with it. But now websites aren't as powerful because if you don't have SEO behind a website, no one is going to see your website. SEO means search engine optimization. If you and 15 people are the only people going to that website and there aren't any backlinks on that website from other heavily trafficked websites, no one's going to see it. But Facebook, where over a billion people reside, they're going to see the messaging there. Now, when you want to get your message out there, you want to do it in a public place that tells this group that you're responding to them, but you don't want to do it in the group page itself. I seen this happen where a group rises up online, they attack an organization, and they start to directly speak to certain people within that organization. They may even tag their name if they see them on Facebook. And then I'll see an official spokesperson from the organization chime in on the group page. You don't ever, ever want to do that, because once you get in there, they are going to suck you dry and they're going to ask you all these questions, and as soon as you backpedal out just to get out, and it could be out, because you have other work to do, they're going to kill you for it. And they're going to say, see, they have no time to speak to us. You are going to fight the battle on your own battleground. You're not going to seek out where they're fighting on their playfield. You're going to do it on your own. However, you are going to respond to their attacks. So if someone says something online in this group, if they have a charge against you and it's not true, you're going to respond on your Facebook page. You may respond with a Press release. You may respond with a note from your CEO on your website. Heck, it could even be a video of your CEO, but you want to respond to it indirectly. It's a way of saying, we hear you. We're going to talk about it on our communication channels, but we hear you. And those people, those opponents that are rising up against you, they'll take note and they'll notice that you're speaking to them. Now, some tips for this solution, like how can you make sure that this plan that you have in place works well? One, always keep your professionalism in check. Don't get too emotional, especially if you're a leader. Don't take it personally. And a lot of these groups are going to attack you personally. I've seen it. I've seen them complain about the salary that that leader might receive or what people are doing on a board of directors. They'll make it personal and sometimes it's ugly. But you want to, you have to remember that everything you do or say can and will be posted online. So you need to respond, but you need to respond carefully and intentionally. And you want to speak to all your customers, not just the ones that are in the group. You want to speak to everyone. The second tip is do not disappear. No response usually reads like you're at fault. It's important to not go into hiding during an online attack, but to rather make any statements publicly after a cooling down period. This is not the time to be emotional. Where you can show emotion is if your organization did something wrong or if you as a leader do feel remorse for some choice that you've made. Maybe you've had to raise your rates, you had to raise your prices. And you know that your customers are feeling the pain from those prices going up. They're feeling it in their wallets. Now's the time that you can explain it and you can tell them how you feel. So the next tip is don't admit any fear. Fault right away when you respond because no one is perfect and your company or you may very well be at fault. But when responding to an attack, don't admit fault. First you want to get your legal counsel and you want to respond with empathy. You first want to say, I hear you, we understand what's happening. But then you go into the playbook, that apology, how to respond to a crisis playbook. You need to acknowledge, you need to apologize or you need to invite admit something. So whatever it is, now's the time to do it. You could be admitting fault. If there was fault, you could be acknowledging that we had a company policy that had to change and it wasn't favorable and no one likes it, but we had no choice, otherwise we'd be out of business. Or if something did happen, this is when you apologize for it. And the next tip is you want to respond publicly. If accusations and attacks are made publicly, then your response needs to be public as well. If you're being attacked on Yelp, then you want to respond on Yelp. If you're being attacked on a Google review, then go straight to Google review and respond to that attack. If you're being attacked on Facebook, you can respond to an attack that appears on your company's Facebook page. But if it's a separate Facebook group or a community that their community is against your organization, that's not the place where you respond. Let them have their own community. You don't need to shut it down, but you just need to be aware that they're there. But do all your response, all of your messaging on your own communication channels, you are not going to succumb to the pressure of your critics. If you follow this plan, you may or may not win them over, but you will land on the right side of the scrum. It happens over and over and over again. The leaders that I see that stand up and acknowledge an issue, apologize for an issue, accept that something has happened. Those are the leaders with the companies that survive it. The ones who do not are the ones that fight it. They take it personally. And they get annoyed with these activists and they call them activists and they make fun of them and they and they pick on them and disparage them where they can. No, if someone is rising up against you, believe it or not, they deserve respect because they care. They care about the product, they care about the service, and they want to make sure that you're doing it right and so do you. All this information is well and good, but you don't even know where to start. It's too much to take on and you're not sure how to get on the right path. So that's why this month's training of the Confident Leader Network is all about how to respond to online attacks. If you join the Confident Leader Network today, you will have access to our three video trainings along with the workbooks. You will also have access to a number of the opt ins that I mention on the podcast and that directly relate to the topic at hand in the three categories of social media, how to in communications and online reputation management. And there's also the online lesson Calm the A Guide to Protecting youg Reputation in a Social Media Crisis. It is a nine module course with a workbook and I have it for general organizations and also for cooperatives so they can learn how to respond to an attack exactly like the ones I laid out in the podcast today when there is a Facebook group rising up against your organization. So that's all for this week on the Confident Communications Podcast. Thanks for listening and I look forward to speaking with you next week.

Sa.