The Art of the Social Media Fail

By Anna Noakes Schulze
What Smart SMEs Can Learn from the Boy Scout Social Media Debacle
A social media disaster is just about the last thing you want to experience as a business. While the social media fails of huge companies attract the most media attention, small- and medium-sized enterprises can suffer disproportionately when their social media efforts go badly wrong. Mistakes happen. You can mess up. Your instincts might let you down. Your gut reaction could be all wrong. You may even get the blame for something that wasn’t your fault. How you handle the crisis determines whether a minor issue blows up into a major one and whether your customers stick with you or go elsewhere.
Today we’ll take a look the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) social media debacle following President Trump’s address at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree. The fallout from this speech and how the BSA responded is a cautionary tale that every SME can use to better understand how to respond to a social media crisis.
What Went Wrong
The Boy Scouts of America is the largest scouting organization in the United States with over 2.4 million youth participants and nearly one million adult volunteers. For over 100 years the BSA has promoted its core objectives including character development, good citizenship, fitness, practical skills, resourcefulness and a willingness to help others. Scouts are sworn to obey the Scout Law, which defines a personal ideal of good character in both thought and deed:
“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.” — Scout Law
Every four years, the BSA holds its National Scout Jamboree, a gathering of tens of thousands of scouts of all ages from across the United States. By tradition, the US president is invited to address the gathering with a typically inspiring and uplifting speech that emphasizes scout values and the importance of doing good in the world.
On July 24th, President Trump took to the podium to deliver his speech to an audience of approximately 40,000 boy scouts. In a highly unconventional, rambling speech, President Trump attacked the media, relived his electoral college victory, touted the Republican health-care bill, bashed Hillary Clinton, and encouraged the crowd to boo former president Barack Obama. President Trump’s hyper-partisan speech broke with 80 years of presidential tradition and treated the National Jamboree just like one of his campaign rallies.
The fallout from this speech was swift and terrible as thousands of angry commentators piled onto Facebook and Twitter to vent their anger. Many parents, lobbyists and politicians suggested that President Trump had failed to uphold basic scout values. The Boy Scouts’ social media debacle was just getting started.

Anatomy of a Social Media Fail
Like the stages of grief, a social media debacle unfolds in a series of phases, each of which can serve to either escalate or defuse the issue. Let’s look at how the Boy Scout leadership unwittingly fuelled the fire.
Phase 1: Ignore
It’s important to note that the BSA has been no stranger to controversy in recent years, having faced public criticism over sexual abuse, bullying, LGBT and transgender rights, and the prohibition of atheist and agnostic members. You might expect that an organisation with a dedicated social media team, published social media guidelines AND experience with controversial issues would know what to do in case of a social media emergency. That’s why the Jamboree debacle was all the more surprising. Despite anticipating the possibility that President Trump would go off-script the BSA simply froze when the worst happened. They abruptly stopped posting Facebook updates about the Jamboree and refrained from reporting on the president’s speech. Phone calls, emails and Twitter comments went unanswered. Whether the inaction was caused by indecision, panic or paralysis, the BSA’s non-response read as one thing: ignoring.
“Respond to people who respond to you. It’s the golden rule of social media.”
— Boy Scouts of America Social Media Playbook, p. 11.
Phase 2: Defend
Left without an appropriate discussion thread on the BSA’s Facebook page, parents started leaving their comments en masse on any unrelated post they could find. There were expressions of profound disappointment at the speech, threats to de-enrol from the Boy Scouts and specific calls for the BSA to apologize.
At this point, the BSA moved from ignoring the issue to passively defending and dug themselves an even deeper hole. Negative comments were not just ignored but swiftly deleted from the Facebook page. This only served to enrage those who felt they were being silenced and disrespected. As a result, many began re-adding and even duplicating their comments across a range of posts as well as complaining about the clumsy attempt to censorship. A bad situation was on the way to getting worse.
Now, just in case you are wondering what aggressively defending might involve I will stifle a shudder as I invoke the name of United Airlines. Earlier this year a damaging viral video emerged of a passenger being violently assaulted prior to a United flight. Dr David Dao, who had refused to give up his seat voluntarily, was seen being battered and forcibly dragged off the aircraft as the other passengers wailed in horror. United’s CEO, a recent winner of a major PR award as “Communicator of the Year”, responded by denying what had happened, lying about the circumstances and attempting to smear the victim, who was seriously injured in the assault. In the ensuing PR nightmare, United Airlines stock dropped by $1.4 billion and the airline quickly settled with Dr Dao for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be $140 million. It was the social media disaster of the year and spawned hundreds of Internet memes.

Phase 3: Minimize
Back to the Boy Scouts… When ignoring and passively defending didn’t work out, the BSA moved onto the next bad approach: minimizing. Minimizing involves deflecting blame by pretending the contentious issue was not that bad, not how it seemed, not our fault or just plain unavoidable. Another way of minimizing is to respond to a different issue than the one that people are complaining about. A sort of deliberate misunderstanding, if you will.
The day after President Trump’s speech, the BSA issued the following statement:

To many, a vague and tepid general statement didn’t go nearly far enough. The issue wasn’t that the Boy Scouts were being partisan, and it wasn’t anger that the president had been invited to speak in the first place. The issue was the content of the speech itself.

How to Turn Things Around
Even this deep into a social media fail, there is still a chance to make amends and win back goodwill. It starts with something very simple.
Phase 4: Apologise
After the BSA issued their first statement the Scouts continued to take a public spanking on social media until finally:

On July 27th, Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh released an open letter on the ScoutingWire in which he admitted that the ten days of celebration at the Jamboree had recently “been overshadowed by the remarks offered by the President of the United States.” He went on to say, “I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the Jamboree. That was never our intent.”
Surbaugh would have been well aware that the uproar had as much to do with character as politics, but refrained from directly criticizing or blaming President Trump. However, he did make a point of signalling his understanding of the character issue by reiterating scout values in the clearest possible terms:
“Few will argue the importance of teaching values and responsibility to our youth — not only right from wrong, but specific positive values such as fairness, courage, honor and respect for others.
For all of the adventure we provide youth such as hiking, camping and zip-lining, those activities actually serve as proven pathways and opportunities to develop leadership skills and become people of character.”
It’s worth noting that the longer you take to apologize for a mistake, an oversight or a bad customer experience, the longer people have to think about what you could have done better. The BSA’s apology was better late than never and that certainly helped to defuse any lingering tensions in the scouting community. What the BSA didn’t say is what they would do differently in future. A few commentators were ready with suggestions, just in case.

Phase 5: Redeem
Once you’ve done everything you honestly can to address a social media disaster you enter the final phase of redemption. If all goes well your customers, clients or members will have forgiven you and things can get back to normal, perhaps even a new and better kind of normal. Redemption is not necessarily forthcoming if your apology was too little, too late, or if you’ve been ungenuine in your response to the crisis, though.
In his Forbes article, The Biggest PR Crises Of 2017, Ronn Torossian offers the following advice:
“A key takeaway for brands is that it’s necessary to apologize immediately after an offensive mistake has been made, especially in the current age of social media, when minor missteps are amplified into major crises within a matter of minutes. Refusing to acknowledge a mistake or apologize will create additional negative attention, and the longer you wait, the worse it will be.”
Since the scout chief’s apology, the Boy Scouts’ Facebook and Twitter feeds have been alive with fresh content about their bread-and-butter activities and interests. There have been reports on camping skills and resources; helpful tips for dealing with bears, dehydration and solar eclipses; and articles relating the good deeds and community service carried out by scouts both at home and abroad. These posts are a reminder of what scouting is all about and what draws the community together. This social media crisis is over.
Key Takeaways for SMEs
At this point, you might be tempted to wonder how a small- or medium-sized business can stand any chance of preventing a social media disaster if venerable organisations like the Boy Scouts of America or huge corporations like United Airlines haven’t succeeded. After all, they have dedicated social media teams, formal social media policies and a great deal of experience in public relations. The fact is that a social media fail is fundamentally a failure of priorities:
- Doing what’s convenient instead of what’s right
- Putting ego ahead of respect for customers and stakeholders
- Putting ego ahead of respect for customers and stakeholders
- Settling for bad policies instead of working towards better ones
- Scapegoating instead of working to find a solution
- Saving face instead of telling the truth
Although the damage travels further for large, well-known firms, PR disasters can be harder on small businesses as they lack the big revenue streams and cash cushion to ride out the trouble. Rest assured that your business can survive and thrive after a social media debacle following this ten-point plan:
- Take a deep breath and clarify your priorities
- Check that you really understand the problem
- Never ignore or erase negative feedback
- Respond quickly, honestly and humbly
- Offer a solution that will resolve the problem
- If needed, apologize completely and sincerely
- Say what you will do better going forward
- Resolve to work harder at winning back goodwill
- Move forward with engaging social media content
- Make sure you have a social media crisis plan
Making mistakes is completely normal and a part of the human condition we all have to live with. Realistically, no one is perfect and no one expects your business to be infallible. Of course, you’ll make every effort to avoid mistakes that upset your customers. But there will still be some mistakes, whether they are your fault or not. What matters is how you respond when things go wrong so that you can maintain or even strengthen your customer relationships through the crisis.
Anna Noakes Schulze is the founder of SunflowerUX, a TEDx speaker, expat mom, organiser, networker, consultant, and tireless customer experience angel. Find out more at www.sunflowerux.com.
You can find more articles by Anna at medium.com/@AnnaNoakesSchulze.
Originally published at https://www.sunflowerux.com on August 24, 2017.
