My motto is and always has been: “If you’re not pissing at least one person off, then you don’t care enough.” My experience has dictated: in order to be successful, you’re going to have haters. Campaigns that receive solely positive feedback should not be considered successful campaigns, because their reach wasn’t broad enough.

FACT: Whenever you’re in the public eye (and ideally, a good campaign or social media page is) you’re will have haters.

The issue comes to dealing with those haters. You may ask yourself, what compels someone to go out of their way and be so nasty online? Assume everything you do that’s interesting, edgy, fun, exciting, different will receive 10 % negative feedback (give or take). You need to be prepared to deal with the response and not worry about their motives.

Prepare in Advance

Before launching your campaign, develop a crisis communication plan for your social media. Think about: What will happen when you receive negative feedback? Who will respond? How will you respond?

Delete if necessary

(My 2 cents) DELETE posts/comments when they are either 1) obviously spam 2) have swear words or hate speech 3) are false (libelous).

Shut down conversations

You should shut down conversations when arguments unfold on your business social media page that (might not) have anything to do with you. For example, if you were a restaurant and you posted a picture of a person eating at your restaurant wearing a Giants jersey- and some Giants & Tigers fans started disputing with each other in the comment section of your photo.

Note: Remember, your page is not a place for people to attack each other. Leaving it alone is the same as endorsing that behavior. Your page is a place for you your fans to engage with you, not to tear each other down.

Be wary

BE WARY of scam artists who pretend to have legitimate complaints about your business on Yelp or Facebook, with the hopes of free swag (dinner, massage, tickets). 

Respond

Honest comments that still have negative undertones need to be dealt with. Respond to that post publicly, but deal with the issue outside of the original medium. A public response communicates to other fans that you do care. Privacy is the best policy for assuaging the situation; it encourages more rational behavior.  I recommend talking over email or phone with the person, and also talking with your staff to get both sides of the story.

After a little digging, you can determine the actual events, and in turn, decide on the best outcome. If they are being honest, apologize and offer to better their experience. If they are not being honest, let the issue go. You may need to block dishonest people from your page to preserve its integrity.

Last Thought: It’s always best to be authentic on your social media pages. If your company did screw up, own up to it. If your company didn’t screw up, feel free to disregard those haters.

Fact: Facebook has a ton of rules. At The Abbi Agency, we are constantly working to make sure our client Facebook pages stay in accordance with those rules. For example, you can’t run a promotion on the Facebook wall if there is a monetary value associated with the prize. Because of that, we use shortstack (a third party application) to run our client Facebook promotions.

Outside of The Abbi Agency, I’ve been working with an organization called “Sexual Futurist” to help them grow their Facebook fans. I employed all the knowledge I learned from The Abbi Agency and advised them as such.

Then, one day, I’m logging on to Facebook and I see this:

Sexual Futurist is an organization that strives to create a community of people who can start intelligent conversations about sex.  I set up their page, and therefore am an administrator. It is their theory that by breaking the stigma of talking about human sexuality, we will be able to solve many problems we’ve been having as a society. (i.e. society’s managing sex offenders, understanding sexual politics, etc).  The Facebook page supports their mission of breaking the stigma. Sexual Futurist wanted to expand their reach and invite people who live in countries where sexual conversation is taboo to join them; including women and minorities, like the LGBT community.

Enter: Facebook advertising.  I advised them to use Facebook ads to reach their target demographic in countries all over the world: India, Pakistan, Brazil…etc.  If people liked the idea of joining in a rational discussion of human sexuality in all of its many aspects, they became a fan of the Facbeook page.  If not, they did not become a fan. Sexual Futurist was able to grow the page from only a few hundred fans in the summer of 2011 to 14,000-15,000 fans in summer 2012.  Cool, right?

Then, they started noticing that the things they were posting on their page were not being seen by all of their fans (because of Facebook algorithms) but not even that, out of 14,000 fans, Facebook was only showing the posts to maybe 1,000-3,000 of the fans. They thought, “Hey! We want more of our fans to see this content.”

So they paid for Facebook posts. They started promoting their Facebook posts (for the small fee of $75) to their own fans (that they had already paid Facebook to obtain). Then, one day, Sexual Futurist wrote a review of the New York Times Bestseller “Sex at Dawn” by Christopher Ryan.  The promoted post said “Best. Human. Sexuality. Book. Ever. Join our book club!”

I’m not exactly sure what happened next. My best guess is that Facebook promoted this post to the fans Sexual Futurist has in Pakistan, but also to the friends of those fans (judging by the comments left on the post). Pakistan is mostly a Muslim country and, unfortunately, many were very offended by the cover of this book.  I think this led them to do one of a few actions: complain, block, report the page. The amount I am unsure of, but enough that drew alert to the page from Facebook officials.

Facebook then sent that notification that I showed earlier that said the Sexual Futurist page was to NEVER AGAIN show up in the newsfeeds of their own fans. I was able to appeal this decision as an administrator. I did this, of course, because I didn’t see why the page should be banned if they were not breaking any of Facebook’s rules that I was aware of.

Facebook responded to my appeal with this:

Sexual Futurist has now been permanently banned from appearing in the fan newsfeeds. So, even the people who signed up and said they wanted to see the content, no longer will.

My takeaway is this:

Facebook should never have shown the content to people who hadn’t opted in to see it (the fans). This is the flaw in the system. Now, after having shelled out quite a bit of money to Facebook, Sexual Futurist has a Facebook page of 15K fans that is obsolete because no one is going to go to that Facebook page without being prompted to in their newsfeeds.

If you are a Facebook administrator, choose your spending carefully. Some items can become obsolete the next day, or in this case, the page can become obsolete.

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I love it because it’s instant, fun, and creative. A successful social media post that receives hundreds of likes, comments & shares is such a great feeling. But…I do it all day every day. I do it at work and I do it in my personal life.  Because I’m so immersed in it, occasionally there are things about it that make me want to throw staplers across the room in hopes that a rogue staple will somehow fly out and hit someone in the eye. #socialmediaproblems

Why do I sometimes hate social media? Oh let me count the ways…

1)     Typos/grammar errors

Social media is immediate, that’s why it works so well. Because of that, it’s easy to post something quickly from your phone without realizing you used the wrong “their” only to proceed to go back to your computer and see the nasty comments from the grammar police. You’d never misspell something on a billboard that reaches 100,000 people, but a tweet could potentially reach that many people as well. We never think to put as much care and thought into a tweet as we do a billboard. Why? Because we don’t think about the weight our 140 character tweet could hold. We probably think that not that many people will see it anyways, so it’s not worth as much attention as say, a billboard.

2)     Here today, gone tomorrow

Content comes and goes. This is why we have a hard time justifying spending an hour crafting the perfect Facebook post. It may get a lot of traction today but give it 24 hours and it’s no longer getting any feedback at all.  People have forgotten about it and went to go play angry birds. 

3)     Can’t post too much, can’t post too little

It’s hard to know how much you’re supposed to post. If you post something and your client posts something at the same time, you’re ridiculed. If you post too much, you’re blocked. If you don’t post enough, you’re unfollowed. What’s the perfect number/amount? No one really knows because social media is so new and constantly changing. If a rule of thumb arises, that rule could become obsolete in the next few days.

4)     It’s unpredictable

Social media is incredibly unpredictable. You could use the exact same formula on one client and see amazing results, use it on another and get no results at all. It comes down to human behavior and the ever confusing and secretive inner workings of the social platforms themselves. Which brings me to #5.

5)     Platforms change all the time

You could spend all your working hours learning the intricacies of YouTube transcriptions, only to come into work one day to see they’ve completely changed the program. Then all of the sudden your client is calling you, asking what happened to their videos and you’re scratching your head.

6)     Complaints/hate mail

These are incredibly hard to deal with. Every client has a different philosophy on how to deal with them. But what about you? Maybe you think all negative feedback (if legitimate) should be addressed on the social media page and your client thinks it should just be deleted immediately. Not to mention, if you’re going to respond, what do you say? Should you be funny? Should you be apologetic? There are so many variables that basically every situation requires a different approach or at least a different conversation about what to do about it.

7)     One day you’re up, the next you’re down

I call it stock market syndrome. You could have an excellent day on Twitter. Come into work and see your twitter followers went up by 50! Then come in the next day and you’re down 70. How does that happen so quickly? How can you receive a pat on the back from your client when all that work just disappeared?

8)     Hard to prove ROI

And it’s hard to prove to your client that what they’re paying you for is delivering them monetary benefits. There are ways to do this for ecommerce clients, but what about ones who don’t sell anything or generate leads from their website? How do you justify to them that you spending 10 hours a week on their Facebook, Twitter, etc is going to be worth the money they are paying you?

9)     Traditionalists are afraid of it

Because it’s hard to prove ROI, it’s easy to receive negative feedback and a slew of other reasons, many people tend to be afraid of social media. It’s really unfortunate when a client could benefit from a social media presence. Then, what ends up happening, even if they agree to it, is they EXTREMELY limit what you’re allowed to post about (you can only talk about the weather!) which totally pulls the rug out of the point of social media.

10)  Lack of control

Clients don’t want to feel like they don’t have any control over what’s going on in social media. If someone tweets something negative about your brand, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t delete it; you can’t message Twitter and demand it be taken down. All you can do is monitor, respond and do your best to show you care.

By Nicole Rose Dion, social media coordinator/graphic designer
Follower her on twitter @nicolerosedion 

When you’re young and inexperienced, being thrown into the PR world can be quite the adjustment. However, I’m a huge fan of channeling mistakes-made into a productive learning experience. I recently surveyed my coworkers and asked them about times when they experienced their worst *face palm moments.

The following is a culmination of 10 mistakes and lessons learned from being in the PR world. They don’t teach this stuff in school, it’s learned through experience, trial and error and now (hopefully) through learning from others’ mistakes.

MISTAKE: You didn’t separate your regular life form your work         

LESSON LEARNED: Don’t feel guilty about leaving work at work. You do not need to work all the time. You would go crazy, have a melt-down or not be able to function as well at work if you don’t relax in your personal life.

MISTAKE: You checked your email on multiple devices

LESSON LEARNED: When you check emails on multiple devices (i.e. work computer, phone, home computer, gmail, etc) you forget what emails you’ve already addressed and end up not responding to important ones.

MISTAKE: You admitted to a mistake in an email

LESSON LEARNED: When you make a mistake, it’s better to pick up the phone and discuss it. You never want to give your client or contact hard (written) evidence to use against you.

MISTAKE: You made the client feel like they are not a priority.

LESSON LEARNED: Even if you’re just being honest, the answer should always be yes to the client. If they ask you if you have time to do something, the answer is always yes when you are around them. Then, afterward, you can find a way to make it work; whether delegating or reprioritizing your work load.

MISTAKE: You tried to help

LESSON LEARNED: No matter what your intentions, do not try to help out in a situation when you don’t have to. If a client or journalist is having a meltdown or is complaining to your coworker about something and you think you can help, let it go. After they leave, ask someone you work with if there’s any way you can help. It’s best to stay out of it and let your boss handle it.

MISTAKE: You pitched a journalist the day before an event

LESSON LEARNED: If you just found out about an event, don’t bother trying to get media to come to it. They will just end up being irritated with you that you waited until the last minute. It’s better to pick up the phone and say “hey (so and so), I just found out about this event and I know it’s last minute but….can you attend? If not, no worries, just wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t forget about you.” Most likely they won’t be able to go anyways but they’ll appreciate the gesture.

MISTAKE: You belittled the client

LESSON LEARNED: No matter what it is, always try to respond with a positive spin. For example, if the client asks you about using a particular photographer, and you know that photographer is terrible, instead of saying “that photographer sucks,” say something like “you know, I actually think I know someone who would be a better fit for this…”

MISTAKE: You didn’t BCC people in a mass email

LESSON LEARNED: Always put contacts in the BCC field instead of CC when sending mass emails. People don’t want others who they don’t know to gain access to their email address.

MISTAKE: You didn’t put every meeting on the calendar

LESSON LEARNED: You missed a meeting! No matter how great your memory is, put every meeting/phone call/webinar that you must attend on your calendar so you will receive alerts when things are coming up. You can even set alerts to notify you 24 hours in advance.

MISTAKE: You sent your client your media list

LESSON LEARNED: This is bad idea for two reasons. One, your client may have someone internally start contacting those people, pushing you out of the job. Two, if you both end up contacting the media, the journalists may get irritated that you’re doubling up.

By Nicole Rose Dion, social media coordinator/graphic designer
Follow me on twitter @nicolerosedion 

The Abbi Agency recently launched their first ever eBook (hopefully there will be many more to come!). It was the first eBook I’d ever done. I’ve made books for print so I figured, how different could a web version be? The answer is much different.

First of all, when sitting down & talking eBook, decide how much time you are willing to put into it. If the answer is not that much time, you’re better off going with a free program like Blurb or Desktop Author.

If the answer is “I have plenty of time, let’s DO THIS!” Then consider getting a designer involved. If you are a designer, go with InDesign. In my opinion, it’s the best program out there for ePublishing.

If you are going the InDesign route, here are some steps to take to create your eBook that will help you avoid the initial mistakes I made:

1. Set up the document: When setting up your document, choose File < New < Document. Make sure your “intent” is set to “web” & not “print.” Turn “facing pages” off. This is for printed books, not eBooks. From there, I set my pages to 8.5 x 11 in because I knew I was ultimately going to turn it into a printed book and didn’t have to have to resize everything. But if you’re just making an eBook and not a print version, go with something smaller so that people don’t have to zoom out in their viewers on their PC or in on their viewers on their phones. Depending on how much text you plan on having, I recommend setting up no more than 2 columns. You can choose not to have these later if you want.
2. Have all the content in a word doc: Before you start designing, make sure all the written content that’s going to go in the file has been checked, double checked & triple checked for spelling, grammar & other errors. This was a huge mistake I made in the beginning. I put all the content in before it had been finalized.
3. Come up with a color scheme: I recommend coming up with swatches and saving them to refer back to later in InDesign. I organized our book into chapters and used a different color to signify a new chapter/topic.
4. Graphics: Make sure all graphics that are imported into the document are set in RGB mode and are of a very high resolution or vector files. People may zoom in and out of your document so you want to make sure your graphics look great no matter what.
5. Links: A mistake I made that drove me nuts was the functionality of the document. I had places where, when clicked, would take the viewer to a certain page in the document or to a link on the web. At first, I set these up as buttons. When I viewed the document as a PDF in a browser, the buttons didn’t work and they were highlighted in blue. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually I converted all my buttons back to objects and just make them “hyperlinks.” This solved all my problems. Not entirely sure why, but it works so I’m just going to go with it and not ask questions.
6. Export: If all you have is hyperlinks as functionality (like I did) exporting as an interactive PDF should work great for Adobe Acrobat or viewing in the browser. Make sure you test this on multiple browsers/computers before launching your eBook.

Hopefully you will learn from my mistakes and your eBook creation will go a lot smoother than mine did. However, if anyone has any questions I’d be happy to try to help. Shoot me an email at Nicole@theabbiagency.com. I also recommend attending InDesign User Group meetings (if you’re in Reno). Those guys are fantastic, and way better at this than I am.

Check out my first eBook here: The Abbi Agency eBook