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Social Media is a very powerful tool. Like all tools, handling it incorrectly can damage your business’s reputation. By examining and understanding what one company did wrong with their social media we can learn how to avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.
This blog post is the product of the news items covering the actions of one company and what they were posting on social media. On 8th February 2022 Radio New Zealand put out the story of a trauma cleaning company using graphic images on their Facebook & Instagram pages. Within a day the business was nationwide news and the owner had to apologise for their company’s actions live on air. Of course they had taken down their pages but by that time the damage was done. They were known nationwide for the wrong reasons.
Up till the story broke the likelihood of someone finding the business was quite low because of the nature of their profession, cleaning locations where a death has occured, is very specialised. Surprisingly, according to the reports, they still managed to get over 2000 Facebook and 5000 Instagram followers. This author suspects a large percentage of those followers were gained after they started posting the graphic scene photos in April 2020 as there is a subculture in the internet that enjoys that sort of ‘graphic’ media . The fact that they were posting such images for 18 months before it came to the knowledge of the general public, shows how easy things can go unnoticed unless you’re specifically looking for them.
It must also be understood that while the business made critical errors in judgment in this matter, they were acting with the best intentions. In a statement made after Radio NZ broke the news, the co-owner explained that ‘he thought that sharing images of the work would raise awareness of important social issues.’ He went on to say ‘he should have kept a closer eye on the content, the pages have been taken down, and the company is reviewing its future on social media.’ It has also been reported that many organisations the business has worked with, including government agencies, have given positive feedback or praise for their work.
Fundamentally it can boil down to three simple mistakes.
THEY DON’T ‘OWN‘ THE WORK SHOWN IN THE IMAGES
This is the clearest and simplest of the mistakes that they made. While they were recording the work they were doing, the ‘product’ they were dealing with was not theirs. They are a contractor hired to perform a service and in the end work belongs to the client that hired them. What they could or could not record is a discussion better suited to a legal expert to cover. This author’s opinion is that, while they could record the work they were doing as part of the process, it would have to remain as internal information and provided to their clients if required. If they wanted to make it publicly available they were obliged to get permission from the clients and other effected parties before doing so. Because they did not, that’s part of what is putting them at risk of criminal charges.
This permission becomes even more important when there is risk of identification of individuals who may not want to be identified. In the case of the trauma cleaning company, the photos were often of family homes so there would be such items as photos or paperwork with contact information in plain sight. This is why you see blurring out of peoples faces or vehicle registration numbers on tv.
So what do you do for your business? Using Copy Express as an example, we print a lot of artists’ work, and while we would love to show all their stuff and have physical examples of them for people to see. We can’t because we are not the owners of the work, we are only ‘hired’ to print it. But we do ask clients if we can feature their work and will always put links back to their business. Asking permission only takes a few moments and often is easier to get than you might expect because people like to show off.
NO TOP DOWN CONTROL
As mentioned above, the co-owners of the business were not keeping an eye on what was being posted on the social media sites. This implies that there was no one person in charge of that aspect of the business, and perhaps even that some or all the staff had access to it and the ability to post. This open access would make it feel more ‘live and raw’ which is important to get traction on social media, it can also lead to the situation where it’s unfiltered which ends up hurting the business’s reputation. We don’t know the full details of how the social media process was handled, it hard to say if the company had any rules about what could be posted or if the rules were being ignored.
If you are not a one person operation, there must be someone who is responsible for the social media side of the business. The business owner must have defined a set of rules of what is acceptable on their social media, and the person in charge must make sure that every post sticks to those rules. You can have staff offer things to be posted but someone should be the ‘editor’ to ensure it reflects the values and image of the business before it goes live. Social media is as much an advert for a business as is the signage on a ute or a flyer put in a mailbox and doing it wrong will damage your business’s image for a long time.
NOT UNDERSTANDING THE VIEWPOINT OF THE CUSTOMERS AND GENERAL PUBLIC
While their intention was good, to demystify the nature business and raise awareness, this still resulted in negative public opinion. These images are traumatic which would disturb many people, made even more upsetting by the fact it’s real life and not special effects. It’s more than that. It is images of places where people’s loved ones have died being shown to strangers. By the very nature of their profession they would have to maintain an emotional distance from work, it has a very close emotional impact on the ones who know the deceased.
In your business you must consider the impact of what you put out on your social media. While to you it might feel like a social chat, this is not you as a person, this is you as your business. It is advertising pure and simple. I have covered it before in a 2018 post Some Simple Rules for Social Media Posts [https://www.copyexpress.co.nz/blog/some-simple-rules-for-social-media-posts/] so have a read of that after you finished with this article.
What can a business do if they screw up their social media and harm their reputation? The damage has already been done, and you can’t remove that damage from the internet as someone always keeps records of everything. What you should do is ‘own it.’ The public is far more forgiving of businesses who accept the repercussions for their actions and show that they have learned from it.
The process you should follow.
No one is perfect, and social media makes it all too easy to say and do the wrong thing on a very public stage. A billion dollar companies with dedicated social media teams can screw up very dramatic ways. A small business with someone handing the social media business in the spare moments between trying to make money is not going to be any different. Always take time and care before you post anything in your business’s social media as it reflects your business and you don’t want to give the wrong impression about it. If you make a mistake, own up to it, apologise, and show you will do better in the future. People are willing to forgive and give second chances to those who show they learn from their mistakes.
Keep an eye on the Copy Express blog as we will be delivering more into the world of social media for small and medium sized businesses. Let us show you how to make the most of it while spending as little time away from what really matters, running your business.
This morning Radio New Zealand reported that the Police have launched a full investigation into the trauma cleaning company. The news item reports that the company will be investigated for breaches of both the Coroners Act and the Privacy Act. This article has been edited to reflect updated information.
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