MANAGE & LEAD
EDITORIAL: USING SOCIAL MEDIA CAN
CREATE COSTLY SELF-INFLICTED CRISES
How to stop “un-selling” yourself and your business through your online platforms.
By Chrissey Breault
Un-selling is the opposite of selling. It’s not good. Stop unselling,
people. Stop it!
It would be easy to stop right there. Instead, we are going
to look at why a major television network canceled a
hugely popular television series reboot that drew close to
25 million viewers each week—and discover what you can
learn from it.
Remember when ABC canceled the “Roseanne” show a
few years ago? Not because it wasn’t selling or because it
wasn’t a moneymaker. Quite the contrary. The network was
pumping money into production and marketing. The stars
were earning huge salaries. Writing and production jobs
were plentiful.
So, what happened? Rosanne Barr, the title character,
made an unwise decision to tweet something racist. In a
nanosecond, everything the show had going disappeared
via the following tweet: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of
the apes had a baby-vj.” ”VJ” was widely believed to be
Valerie Jarret, a former senior adviser to President Barack
Obama.
Before you could finish snapping your fingers, the revenue
disappeared. The jobs disappeared.
Are you wondering what the heck any of this has to do with
you or your business? As is true of too many companies,
the crisis was self-inflicted. Self-inflicted crises are acts of
“un-selling.”
Organizations can no longer defend themselves against
these types of situations. Admitting defeat and closing
shop often turns out to be more cost-effective than fighting
a controversy and its fallout.
Astonishingly, more than a decade after Facebook and
Twitter made their debut, so many people and companies
still seem (and act) oblivious to the consequences.
No one is safe—not even a mega-celebrity whose brand
is already controversial and has said many things in her
comedy routines that offend a wide variety of people.
There was a time when a major network like ABC would
experience a similar crisis, hunker down with lawyers and
public relations professionals for a few days or weeks, and
then estimate how much money they would lose if they
were to cancel a show. They would compare that number
to the revenues they had expected to earn before the
crisis. Those days are gone.
These days, decisions are swift, brutal, and costly.
Every organization is vulnerable to un-selling, whether it
starts with yours or an employee’s post, or with a third
party who captures a bad situation on video and shares it
with the world.
Getting ahead of un-selling requires crisis planning and
training.
PLAN, PRACTICE AND STOP UN-SELLING
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, or how popular
you are. Sometimes, un-selling just happens. Sometimes,
un-selling is more than a slip of the tongue—it might
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