Social media enables anyone to be a critic of anyone else and to have their criticism heard by all online, which means we must all be careful about what we say and how we act online. Thus follows an example of how not to react when someone criticises you online and the unexpected consequences of an organisation’s response to that criticism.

You can’t say that!

In a previous, and quite tongue-in-cheek post, about how organisations can use social media tools (video, blogging, forums, comments, reviews, linking) to forward their own agendas (however ill-informed and seemingly unhinged they may be) I flagged up some of the dangers of this new and still emerging medium.

No matter who you are, you could suddenly find that lots of people suddenly start spreading what you might class as unwelcome comment about you or your organisation online.

Ego-surfing

I keep track of what people say about me and my organisations by using what some people would call ‘ego surfing’ - that is, searching for one’s own name or company’s name on Google and seeing what comes up.

It can often be pretty enlightening - you see who’s linking to you and what they are saying.

A good idea is to use Technorati (or a blog search engine for our purposes) to deliver you an RSS feed of any new mentions that appear online for your name or company name. Pretty handy. Whenever something new appears you get notified and can keep track of and respond to anything that is said.

Improving customer relations by responding to criticism

This is great for customer service for larger organisations and means that you are responsive to criticism as well as rave reviews. Even when critical, reasonable people who blog about something they don’t like _nearly always_ like it when the company or person in question responds with a comment in response.

Engaging in a dialogue with people who are critical of you or your activities can often feel counter-intuitive, but often people want to blog about something because they feel frustrated that they can’t tell you about it another way.

The result is one of the blogger’s favourite pass-times: ‘the rant’, which helps vent some of that frustration.

Engage in conversation or ignore it

Assuming that you have your ego-search results coming into your feed reader or email every day, you can safely assume that if someone is saying something about you then you are going to hear about it.

That then leaves you with a number of responses. To comment, to ignore, or in the case of someone saying something that is so far out there that it’s downright illegal, to start looking at legal responses to what has been published.

Surface Unsigned - an example

So, this week we had a great example of this happening, and should be an example to any organisation faced with similar challenges.

The situation:

• A blog post had gone up on Created in Birmingham saying something about an organisation called Surface Unsigned that they didn’t agree with.
• The blog post had seen some pretty heavy commenting and linking, and was now appearing at the bottom of the first page on Google for their ‘ego-search‘.
• To Surface Unsigned that was pain because people searching for them might see the article and form a potentially negative opinion of their organisation by reading it.

How to respond?

So out of our three options: ignore, comment or get legal, Surface Unsigned decided on the latter and to skip a few steps along the way too.

Herein lies the mistake - we’ll get onto that.

Getting legal

Given that there was a comment online that they didn’t like they decided on the legal option. Now there are actually two different routes to go here with any legal response:

Softly softly

Send a ‘first shot’ email to the author, saying that you’re not really very happy about the content of the article and would like to point out some inaccuracies that they should consider putting up as amendments to their comments.

If that falls on deaf ears, then send another, more strongly worded email, backed up by solid legal advice about the content of the comment and ask them to amend their comment to reflect their inaccuracies with those legal issues in mind.

If that fails, then move onto:

Getting tough with a Takedown Notice

Surface Unsigned skipped the softly softly approach too, moving straight onto what’s called a ‘Takedown Notice’. I won’t go into the detail here, but they used some pretty inaccurate legalese to try to scare the blogger in question into removing his entire post from the web.

That sometimes works, and is the method that some of lawyers might advise if they’re just dealing with a straight up legal case.

Don’t let your lawyers drive your PR strategy

The trouble is, the blogger had a strong community of people and told a handful of friends about the scary email he’d received.

Knowing something of the legal issues involved it was pretty obvious that the Takedown Notice wasn’t strictly accurate, and far from removing the post from the web, it has now actually fanned the flames, resulting in further comment, blogging and links to the post that they disagreed with.

The strategy backfired

Put simply - the company made a big mistake in taking a legal line in such a public forum.

The result is that as of right now the blog post they didn’t like appearing in their search engine results has now gained several positions and is now number two on Google for a search for the organisation’s name.

So now more people will read the content that they disagreed with, rather than fewer.

The strategy just wasn’t effective because they allowed their legal hat to take over what should have been a job for the PR hat.

What can we learn from this?

If you see a blog post or article online that you disagree with:

• Breathe. Relax. Think “is this really that bad?”
• Do nothing. See what happens. Doing nothing is a response in itself, and the post might just disappear and nothing more happen about it.
• If it’s seeing lots of activity around it start thinking “what is my response?”
• If you have a PR department or advisor, speak to them. Get their advice.
• Think - “is this a legal issue?” Is it fully-fledged copyright theft? Does it directly affect my livelihood?
• If it’s really not that bad and is just someone commenting, consider engaging in a dialog with them. Respond with a metered non-aggressive comment or email explaining your position on it and why they should consider amending their post.
• If that doesn’t work, go back and think “is this really that bad?”
• If it really is, then start considering your legal options. Seek solid legal opinion on what you can do and follow it to the letter. Don’t feel the urge to send a ‘take it down or else’ email without real legal arguments behind it.
• If there is no response to your first contact then your lawyer will be able to take the matter further but it will be expensive and time-consuming. Again - think, is this really worth several thousands of pounts? What will happen if I get them to take it down? Will they just put it up again somewhere else? Am I aiming at a moving target and would I do much better on focussing on positive things?

Whatever you do, just don’t skip from ‘no contact’ to ‘full on legal takedown notice’ without very good legal advice.

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