Ep 111 What if Reporters Create a Story Out of Social Media Criticism About You and Don't Call You April 20, 2016

What do you do if your customers or members of the public are attacking you in social media and then mainstream reporters pick up the story?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This is a question I do hear from time to time. Just last week, one of my clients in North Carolina brought this up. They say, TJ what happens when we see we're being attacked in social media? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? We typically ignore attacks. But then the local newspaper reporter, even the TV reporter, will do a story about it and not even call us. What do we do about that? Well, I'll give you my analysis in just a moment.

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I do think any entity, large or small, needs to monitor what people are saying about it in social media. Now, obviously, if you are a cable TV company, you can't respond necessarily to every single person because there could be thousands and thousands of people complaining about the movement of a channel somewhere that you really had nothing to do with because the contract simply changed with another cable provider. But you certainly do need to be aware of what people are saying. Now, with any large organization, a bank, you could have someone complaining, oh, the Walker bank didn't give me a mortgage. Aren't they idiots? You don't necessarily want to get involved with that because there may be a perfectly good reason that the bank didn't give you a mortgage. Maybe you have awful, awful credit. Maybe you have no income. I don't mean to sound like an apologist for banks. That's just a for example. But if you see that a lot of people are making similar criticisms and it is perhaps tied into some larger news story, and you have a sense that a mainstream reporter or a traditional media reporter might find this interesting, don't be surprised if that reporter just puts together a story, pulls negative quotes from Twitter, Facebook, others and puts a story up. So what do you do if that happens? Couple of suggestions right away. My first recommendation is at least get your perspective in the story. And instantly, if you see at 3 o' clock on a Thursday afternoon, there's a story in your local newspaper, on the web that's harshly critical of you, that has your customers complaining about something and it turns out it really has nothing to do with anything you could have done differently. It was just a supplier of yours decided to no longer make their products available with you. But for an example, my recommendation is put together two at Most three sentences that have quotable elements, sound bite elements, and then email the reporter, say, hey, saw your story and thought that your readers would really want to know the following. And then just give them that 1, 2, 3 sentences. They can cut and paste it and put it in the story. Now, in my experience, the vast, vast majority of reporters will do as you want. They actually want a fuller story. Maybe they wanted to call you and got tied up or forgot a deadline. Doesn't matter if you make their life really easy. If all they have to do is spend 10 seconds cutting pasting, they will typically do it. Now what you don't want to do is go on this big. So unfair of you. And you're not a good journalist. And why didn't you call me? I mean, there's these natural instincts that people have to whine and complain and fuss. Reporters are like anyone else, they don't really want to hear it, so put a sock in it is my advice. Instead focus on the actual solution. The solution, at least the partial solution, is that your perspective gets out there to the public who's hearing about this through a traditional media story. Maybe there's 10 people in the story attacking you, but I'd rather there be 10 people attacking me and one person that is me saying why what I'm doing is a great job, rather than it just being completely 100% one sided against me. So that is your first avenue right there. And the whole key is it's got to be speed. If the story's been up for three days and you're now sending a certified letter and the letter is 10 pages long, no one wants to deal with it. They don't even want to read it. It's old news, it's a problem. The key is quickness. I'd much rather you get a two sentence response within an hour or two hours of the story breaking than a thorough, detailed three page analysis two days later. It's just too late for that in the modern media world. Now let's back up. At some point, if you are a part of a major organization, major business, government entity, utility, if you see a whole lot of people upset about something or annoyed about some, or reacting to how your company handled itself in a storm or a power outage, you should figure out there's a good chance that a mainstream reporter is going to want to cover this. My advice, don't wait. Come up with your response and it doesn't necessarily have to be just two or three sentences, but come up with a good paragraph perspective on the story that you want your customers to know and post that on social media. Post it on your Facebook page, post it on your news page, on your own website. You can excerpt it and do one sentence at a time on Twitter if you need be. But if your customers, if people in the public, people in the community you serve are upset about something, don't just sweep it under the carpet. If no mainstream reporter is covering it, answer them directly as quickly as possible. This way, if a reporter does decide to do the story, it's going to be really easy for them. Cut and paste from Twitter, Facebook, the people attacking you, but they can also cut and paste from the response you put out there. Unfortunately, too many people take the attitude of, well, let's just hope it blows over. And if a reporter doesn't call, then it didn't really become a real story. If you've got more than a handful of people complaining all about the same thing, let me tell you, it is a real story to those people. So I would treat them seriously, treat them as seriously as a reporter. Now, if it's just one crank, especially if it's one crank who's always complaining about something and it's something different every day, yeah, you do have to ignore those. You don't want to escalate that, you don't want to put oxygen on the fire. But if it seems like a legitimate complaint, if you think a fair minded person would read this criticism of you and think, hmm, that seems like a legitimate beef, if that's what you think someone would do, then you need to answer accordingly. Again, the key is speed and the key is focus on the central points that are most important so that if someone is only halfway casually reading the criticism and your response, they understand it. Don't hide behind legalisms, don't hide behind bureaucracy, don't talk about how it's really someone else's job. Focus on what's most important that gets your side of the story out and would also make that person feel better who's complaining. And if you can't make that person perfectly happy, focus on at least what a fair minded person. Seeing both sides would help them conclude you are in the right and you're doing all you can and you're not really doing something horrible or evil here. These days the lines between social media, traditional media are blurring. They're going back and forth, they're cross pollinating. You simply do not have the luxury of saying we're not going to respond to anything until the editor of the Daily Bugle calls and only then will we respond. That is too late. So my final recommendation. Monitor all social media. Respond anytime you think it's legitimate, even if you don't think it's legitimate. If a certain number of people, a certain threshold and you've got to use your own gut instinct or all complaining about the same thing, then you need to get ready to respond and you need to get it out there quickly and it needs to be succinct and packaged in sound bite form. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for spending some time with me today. I hope I see you here tomorrow and the day after and the day after. Because I'm here seven days a week. Hope you can join me. If not every day, then as often as possible. Thanks again. See you tomorrow.

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