#unfollowdiddy Trending on Twitter
Logged on to Twitter and saw this funny new trend: #unfollowdiddy
Now, I’m not sure what ignited this, but one thing you have to get used to as anybody online is that there will ALWAYS be negative and crazy feedback to whatever you are doing. That’s just life. It’s hard working with celebrities to get them to understand this. You should always be expecting it, so the question is, are you prepared for it? and what do you do?
Sometimes the answer is: Ignore it.
If your community is strong enough, the positive responses and engagement will just drown out the negative. If you bring attention to it, you are the one making it bigger than it is.
#unfollowdiddy
But, if your community isn’t strong enough in the positive, let’s just say for the sake of argument that Diddy’s isn’t, how do you deal with it? It depends, but here are a few ideas:
Engage Your Top Members, The Influencers. OK, so your community isn’t strong enough on it’s own to let the positive drown out the negative, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have a few influencers in your army somewhere. It might only be one or two, but you can start with that. Engage those influencers directly, get them involved about what they want to see from you and what they want to do, and get them talking to your community, not you. Any response from you right now fuels the negativity, so it has to come from someone else. Just keep a handle on your influencers to not get defensive. You have to give those influencers the power to engage your community where they can’t on their own yet. The important part is that it doesn’t come from you right now.
Any Publicity is Good Publicity. This isn’t always true, but a lot of the times it is. I say this a lot to artists who get angry about negative posts from Perez Hilton. I tell them, “trust me, you’re lucky he’s blogging about you at all because that means you are still relevant. Worry the day he doesn’t blog about you because that means you’re not even relevant enough for him to make fun of.” This may be the case now with Diddy. Maybe he should embrace it as a sign that he’s popular enough to ignite this sort of negative attention and because of all the attention, people will actually want to follow him. Personally, I would never blog this much about Diddy if it wasn’t for this, so just ride the ride and see what happens.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. People love self deprecating humor if you really embrace it. It knocks you off your own pedestal and puts you back on the viewer’s level and gets their attention again, and maybe some respect, or at least a few laughs. Address the response, in this case #unfollowdiddy, directly, head on, but not defensively, just join in! Maybe diddy creates a new account and Tweets “Hilarious! I can’t unfollow myself, so I signed up as @whatever and followed myself, just so I could unfollow myself #unfollowdiddy.” Everyone laughs, and they move on.
In the meantime, #unfollowdiddy! lol.
*Update: After talking to a few people in response to #unfollowdiddy I need to add another note to the above list, and that is pay attention to your engagement stats! Pay attention to what people are saying. However that may be, # of responses, using TwitTruth, whatever you need to do. If Diddy noticed that nobody is engaged with his tweets (translation: nobody cares) then he might have been able to preempt the #unfollowdiddy trend.