Lesson: Social Media & Branding with Crystal Lee

Step #9 Responding: How to appropriately respond to negativity and positivity over social media

We've received negative tweets at Miss California, but I tend to sweep them under the rug. And the reason why is because we're too small an organization at this point to really be bogged down by something that can quickly grow into something that we don't want it to. So we don't get a lot of negative tweets, but the moment we do I ignore it, because responding to it would be the equivalent of fanning flames. At this stage in our growth, it's a fight that we don't want to pick. If we get large enough one day to do it, I might even retweet someone's snarky tweet, and see legions of followers go after that person, just kidding.

But there is this thing called public shaming that happens a lot, and public shaming is when people who tweet something that is unsavory to the general public gets broadcasted out, and everybody else hops on that person's account and inundates them with basically slaps on the wrists saying "How dare you?" or equal threats to basically put them in their place. And public shaming can be very severe sometimes almost to the point where people have to shut down their accounts. But sometimes that's the whole point of public shaming, you say something racist everybody is going to come after you, and make you wish you never tweeted it to begin with. So social media really is becoming more social. It is really, really about the conversation, and people are bringing in a lot of their values and their morals and their ethics to Twitter too, because the people behind the screens really aren't feeling like they're behind a screen anymore.

I do thank people occasionally. I thank them if I know them personally, because I think that's where I feel I have a connection to someone, and I replicate that online. I also thank someone if it's a sponsor, and I feel like it's another chance to retweet that person in a way that isn't a direct retweet. So thanking someone can almost be a form of retweeting, because it can be expanded for a follower to see what I was responding to. So it's another way to kill two birds with one stone. They see the original post, and they see the sponsor, but they can see my response to it, and my response to it is what got them to see the original post to begin with. So it's sort of a two for one special when you reply.