Social Media in Brand Defense
How blog posts and tweets can replace cease-and-desists and writs when defending your brand's reputation.
Businesses take shots at other businesses all the time. It happens. But when one of our franchise partners called us, complaining that a competitor had gone too far, we were listening.
This competitor had taken to his website and questioned whether our franchise model resulted in bad customer service and whether Nurse Next Door was unduly interested in “selling franchises.” Ouch.
Our initial reaction was to talk to our lawyers. They assured us it was defamation and were ready to get involved. Did we want to go that route, though? What about the next time it happens? Were we going to run to our lawyers every time we took an elbow?
Instead, an experiment: We took to our social media channels. I wrote a blog post drawing attention to the issue and talking about why we’d decided to franchise in the first place. We wanted to get a discussion going.
The response was passionate and positive, not just from partners but from clients and the public – even competitors. The next step was to try to bring that competitor into the conversation. We figured if he saw the response our post was getting, he’d take down at least the direct jab at us. It worked. He removed the worst of the content within minutes.
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on lawyers to help defend our brand, we’d managed to do it ourselves, by the curious stratagem of focusing even more attention to it.
The big risk of addressing the issue in social media was the release of control over the “narrative.” This is frightening for any company, more so one in a defensive posture. But there’s trust inherent in the gesture, too, and that’s what I think people responded to.
The essential lesson here is good faith. If you have an online following you’re confident in, empowering them to be your brand defenders may be better than seeking legal redress. Taking the high road has its perils, it’s true, but it is often the path of least resistance. It’s possible to get what you want while saving money and bringing your online community even closer to your brand.
John DeHart is the co-founder of Nurse Next Door.
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