All businesses are advised to build a solid brand and a strong online presence, but have you ever wondered why? These days having an online presence is crucial with your digital marketing and sales strategies. Business leaders are advised to invest largely in SEO and PPC advertising and social media campaigns for good reasons. The more consumers see your brand, your products, or your service, the better. It increases customer retention, provides more leads, and improves Google rankings.
The power of social media is truly amazing and beneficial to businesses, and as for business leaders and marketers, social media is like a big crowd gathered in one place; a crowd of potential clients or customers. However, what if this notable social media power was turned against you and your organization?
Let us entertain the thought of one morning you will wake up and realize that the crowd of supposed potential customers is all rallying on social media to cancel your products or services?
What Exactly is Cancel Culture?
Merriam Webster defined cancel culture as “the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling” largely by social media users. It is akin to an angry mob. Perhaps that is even a good analogy for these users who are seeking to cancel a person, a brand, an organization, and even culture and traditions.
Twitter users often start the statement with “Let’s normalize,” to cancel an existing phenomenon, and use the term “canceled” to cross out people, services, brands, or products that somehow didn’t align with their expectations, opinions, and beliefs.
The mass-canceling is often so bad that users resort to bullying and humiliation to somehow prove their point against the subject in question. The worst part is that these people often tend to lack the critical thinking needed in using the world wide web. They are gullible, and they do not see other perspectives to understand the whole picture.
When Amber Heard accused Johnny Depp of domestic violence, they easily turned against the actor. Then the truth came out, and pieces of evidence were released online, and the mob lashed out to Amber Heard just as fast.
Celebrities and icons are not the only ones being canceled, business brands too, and most especially. Today, people find it easy to rant about a service or product when they get disappointed, and sadly, most users are not objective about the concern. So, even if it was not your team’s fault, your brand will suffer from negative reviews, harsh comments, and unjust hashtags that can all be trending.
For example, you are running a VPN service, and your systems go down for a few hours. Expect complaints spreading all over the internet mentioning your brand name. Depending on how large the system failure was, it is best to look for PR services for tech companies to help you with the correct approach to remedy what happened and appease your clients.
If you are thinking that you can easily shrug this off and go on about your daily operations, then you must consider the following reasons below:
Why You Shouldn’t Take the Cancel Culture Phenomenon Lightly
It is easy to think that things can easily blow over, especially when you are running a well-established large company. Take Facebook as an example. A few days ago, the Facebook empire took a six-hour system hit, and the whole world exploded, or maybe imploded? There were a lot of angry and frustrated people on Twitter. Some were making fun of founder Mark Zuckerberg, making memes out of the horrible situation, social media competitors were maximizing the opportunity, and lastly, Facebook lost over $79M of ad revenues.
If it was your organization in the rocks, how would you handle the angry mob for something that was out of your control?
The cancel culture can be too overwhelming, and it can ruin your brand. It is crucial especially for startups and small businesses who cannot afford to have their brand names dragged in the mud. Well, you can always rebrand, but once it’s out there on the internet, it never really goes away. Whether that is one unsatisfied customer that canceled your services for simply receiving the wrong item, you already lost a portion of potential clients because of that.
Indeed, you can prevent these scenarios, but one way or another. You do not know how consumers and internet users will react, but certainly, most of them do not see reasons. It is the privilege providers indirectly gave them for being consumers.
Perhaps, the cancel culture phenomenon has always been around us, only this time it has been magnified to the point of having the capability to ruin people, brands, and businesses. Don’t let this happen to you, be aware and be prepared.
