To the walls!

What to do when your brand is under attack?

More and more companies are going social and have established a presence online as a means of engaging directly with their target audience and building communities around their products or services. As most social media departments will know, when starting a campaign it is always important to monitor the brand to find out why, what and where they are being talked about. This will give the campaign a structure when setting up profiles on various social media platforms and creating  engaging content, whether it's in the form of a blog post, tweets, video, etc. There is quite a lot of work involved when setting up and executing what a business might think is the perfect social media plan and strategies.

What happens when it all goes wrong & the consumers start to attack a brand? In the last couple of weeks I followed the John Lewis group on Facebook. The company had been subjected to a series of verbal attacks for advertising their Christmas video. The video was advertising their Christmas message, which caused somewhat of an uproar towards the end of the video when it showed a child coming out to hang a stocking on his dog's kennel, with the dog sitting outside in the snow. This prompted animal lovers to complain about animal cruelty in there droves. A series of very negative mentions continued to pour onto the Facebook page over the next few days.
 
To view the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpV-xagkTDU

When you are an established brand, how do you deal with such a series of negative mentions?
Firstly, you need to listen to the key points of contention to gain an idea of how to approach and placate the audience. The worst thing a brand can do is shy away and ignore comments being made as brand credibility will be lost immediately, which could potentially lead to a loss of sales/loyalty. The audience are giving their feedback and they will at some point want to be have their concerns and opinions addressed by the brand.
 
John Lewis monitored their Facebook page and with the initial comments, simply passed on the complaints email address. As momentum built however, this was not feasible and it became apparent that they would have to address the issue 'en masse.' After a day or two John Lewis released the message below:



This message was intended to reassure the audience with the tone that they adopted, and offering a willingness to make a shorter version of the advert. Since then there were still negative comments being made, however, the Facebook wall was updated the next day with a resumption of their normal social media activity.
 
This is a great example of how a brand or a large business tries to resurrect their brand's image. Above, I touched on 'the tone that John Lewis adopted,' and wanted to further explain this. A company's tone is extremely important in social media as a means of defining the brand's values and bringing recognition for the sort of company that they are. It is therefore really important to understand the brand so think about the tone every time a response is required. It's not the end of the world when your brand receives negative mentions, act on it sensibly and you will either sway those criticising or you will take the emotion out of the equation.
 
On a final note, I obviously had an opinion on John Lewis's Christmas advert and I was for keeping the old advert. This was simply because it was meant to depict a light-hearted scene, cleverly designed to evoke positive emotions related to the Christmas season.