Toronto “Arts Czar” shows us how *not* to do engagement

A concern we hear a lot from marketers and business people is about how to deal with critical voices in social media — people who’ve had a bad customer service experience with you, have had problems with your product, people who are just huffy that you exist.

And the stock social media guru response to those concerns is that businesses should engage with those critical voices and use them as occasions to win converts.

We couldn’t agree more.

But there is a right way to engage with critics and a wrong way.

Last week, the man assigned to coordinate arts policy for the City of Toronto, Jeff Melanson, offered Torontoist blog readers a master class in the WRONG way.

Melanson’s blistering retort to what was actually a pretty positive year-end nod to the annual Nuit Blanche arts event provides these 3 key lessons in the WRONG way to engage with critics (real or perceived) on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere.

Lesson 1: Be defensive

No matter how small the slight or how glancing the blow, react to it. Strongly.

Be accusatory and insulting.

This will immediately establish you as “the enemy” with your critic AND his or her audience and is sure to inflame the debate to a point where the issues are mostly obscured by emotion.

Lesson 2: Be sarcastic

Nothing shows your contempt for critics so much as a few deftly placed ironic “quote marks”. Refer to your critics as “intelligent” instead of just intelligent or “informed” instead of just informed and they’ll get the point that you have no respect for their views. And you can be certain that they’ll return the sentiment.

Lesson 3: Distort your opponents views

If your critic says something that you agree with, ignore it and insinuate that they said the opposite. This will let everyone know that you’re out to make a point, not friends or followers.

As Melanson found out, when you follow these simple steps you can shift the debate to focus on the flaws in your arguments and galvanize your critics against you. If you’re especially attentive to these anti-lessons, you may even be able to leverage skepticism about your brand into outright hostility towards both your brand and your personal reputation.

So what’s the RIGHT way to handle a situation like this?

There are lots of right ways, but if I were ghost writing for Melanson, I would’ve handled it something like this:

“It was great to see Scotiabank Nuit Blanche make your year-end “Heroes” list. I do want to address something you said about likely arts funding cuts under the new administration, though. Although the Mayor’s critics have been successful in branding him as anti-arts, Mayor Ford has said publicly many times that City arts funding will stay stable in 2011. And he has personally assured me that there will be no cuts to funding over the course of his entire mandate. I believe him. And I believe, too, that if the City’s arts community works together we can further galvanize support for the arts at City Hall.”

I’m sure a better writer could do a better job than that. But they’d probably follow similar principles: be professional and respectful; be sincere; admit when you’ve been wrong.