“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not half putting weight on around your face and your eyes are looking a bit piggy. No offence, like…”
“No, it’s fine; good job you said no offence and told me not to take it the wrong way. I battened down the hatches and was fully prepared.”
It just doesn’t work like that in natural conversation, does it? No-one wins; one looks rude and doesn’t carry themselves well, while the other is either quietly offended, weighing up whether to stew on the comment for hours or punch the person right between the eyes.
This isn’t something that’s recently happened to us, by the way. We’re not releasing pent-up rage here. But let’s be honest, we’ve all come across people that comment unnecessarily in all walks of life. The vast majority are decent people and apologise straight away when they realise they may have spoken out of turn or touched on a sensitive subject.
Not on the internet, though.
Our favourite thing about the internet and its culture is the limitless potential it has to connect people across the planet, from different cultures and radically alternate backgrounds, to collaborate creatively and look to change the world.
The caveat of such an amazing thing, though, is faceless keyboard warriors and trolls looking to antagonise and hurt as many people as possible. It can be as low as people pretending to be a dead person to target people on Twitter, to orchestrated campaigns involving hundreds of people attacking a single person.
Such are the liberties afforded to all of us with free speech. What’s absolutely amazing to us, though, is when the negative behaviour bleeds into the commercial, and people in high corporate positions forget themselves in social media marketing.
Getting biblical
And, so it was written: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," Isaiah 55:8.
In short, be respectful of other people. Social media has a powerful, innate ability to make people forget their very ways, though, and make them embarrass themselves in the most public ways if they aren’t paying attention. Twitter especially doesn’t get a lot of love from the media in this regard (though when they purposefully collect negative tweets targeting people they aren’t really winning any arguments).
The further social media and smart devices creep into our lives the more we have to think about what we say online. Especially in a commercial sense; if you have a personal profile, a disclaimer pointing out that you ‘work for X company but opinions are my own’ isn’t any kind of legal defence or protection if you go on a massive rant on social media about sensitive topics.
Something that a steward working at Everton Football Club recently discovered when she tweeted that neighbouring Liverpool fans were “murderers” that “need to all be put down”. She has since been sacked and the public apologies have come thick and fast, but it’s those moments of madness that are so personally and commercially dangerous.
And it can happen anywhere. This article has been partly inspired by Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, amazingly rich super investor who managed to upset one of the most powerful men in the world earlier in the month by letting off several incredibly bad brain farts over Twitter about India.
Facepalm
India took the brave decision to ban Facebook’s Free Basics a few weeks back, citing that it wasn’t healthy for the growth of the internet and that it was more in the interests of Facebook than consumers. “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” Andreessen tweeted, amongst other ill-thought statements from a position of enormous privilege.
Zuckerberg almost immediately distanced himself from Andreessen – who has previously been a popular figure in and around Silicon Valley – by posting about how upset he was at what he’d read. After some reflection (possibly on how much he stood to lose) Andreessen removed the tweets and wrote a statement emphasising his admiration and respect for India.
Erm… OK. It’s full-force damage limitation for something that shouldn’t have been tweeted in the first place, and it’s difficult to see the difference between Andreessen and the Everton steward. They got a bee in their bonnet about something ill-informed and decided to tell the world about it before being pulled up by a higher power and forced into an apology.
We can’t underline just how important it is to watch what you’re saying, sharing, and endorsing through your social media marketing. We’re not saying don’t have an opinion or a voice – far from it, that’s what the internet’s about. But think before you press send, and consider if it’s something you’d say as a company employee to a customer in front of you 'in the real world'.
Because we’ll bet our house that the steward and Andreessen wouldn’t walk into a crowded bar in Liverpool or India respectively and say what they did on social media.
Spin city
What’s truly astounding is the amount of companies that hurt their inbound efforts and risk their reputation being torn to shreds. So many that it’s hard to choose just one example; SpaghettiOs made an appalling job of remembering the Pearl Harbor disaster in 2013 while Volkswagen got hit where it hurts when it was revealed the company was deleting negative comments and censoring the public on its Facebook over their green credentials.
We’ve also compiled a list of some of the worst examples over the last few years, each one more disastrous than the last in a public relations sense. All of this underlines precisely how important it is for everybody involved in your inbound campaigns to be on the same wavelength for a number of reasons; to help attract people to what you’re doing, to achieve commercial consistency, for brand control, and for positive PR.
The Isaiah verse also says more than it means to in regard giving respect. Because respect for others is the key lesson to learn when it comes to professional social media marketing and inbound. There’s a difference between being positive and approachable professionally on social media, and using age old spin tactics to potentially mislead.
Recent research by the Digital Trust Index shows that half of the UK and France distrust the internet. Astonishing if accurate; and a lot of that distrust, for our money, comes when the wool is very publicly pulled over the public’s eyes when something shifty is going on. Big internet agencies and the amount of tax they pay, for example, is a huge public issue with a lot of spin from the top level naturally following.
Google for instance has been under the microscope for the amount of tax it pays, along with other internet giants operating from the UK. The laws of the nation, as the Independent discovered, actually make Google’s tax activities legal and are costing the country millions in taxable revenue. And not to get political but there was a lot of spin when the subject was first broached, with the treasury insisting that its previous tax settlement with Google was a ‘major success’.
Hmm… we’ll let you make your own mind up. The Spectator calls it Karma, and that’s always the danger when it comes to spin and social media marketing. Being honest and transparent upfront at all times with your audience and the people you want to work with is a much better option than trying to spin yourself out of a self-dug grave in public, surely?
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. Make sure your social media management is helping not damaging your brand by reading our post "How to boost your brand reputation with social media management"