In this article, we consider if a public relations specialist is able to stop a flame war online. A flame war is when two sides take up positions and then take shots at each other, usually with increasingly insulting comments. Flame wars are not such a big problem on their own, but when one side starts fighting the other with increasing numbers, it can create a permanent rift with a customer base and significantly damage a brand’s reputation for a very long time. This article shows that a Public Relations Specialist can help stop a flame war and fix up your online reputation, and it also gives a few snippets of advice too.
Stopping All Communication
For starters, you should not be taking part in flame wars. You need to remember that your customer is always right and you need to put your feelings to one side and grow up. Be an adult and stop taking part in this sort of nonsense. If your staff is causing these problems, if they are going online to “Defend” their work and such, then put a stop to it immediately.
When Stopping Communication is Not Enough
Even if you and your staff have bowed out of a fight, this doesn’t mean your customers will stop. There is also the fact that other people will happily join in because an online insulting match is pretty fun. The people fighting the flame war have a little-to-no stake in the outcome, which is why such outrageous comments are almost always made. When the problem has drawn to these sorts of levels, you need a PR specialist to start smoothing things over.
Letting Your PR Specialist Work
You need to pick a highly skilled PR specialist who knows how the platforms work and how these sorts of problems function. The aim is to get things to wind down so that the participants start losing interest. The PR specialist wants to stop things from escalating because once accusations start being made, they become increasingly more difficult to stop or shift. If you have found a good PR specialist, then give him/her/all the help that is required to get the job done. This may include blocking and administrator functions and will often mean giving access to other online accounts.
Finding The Right Type of Help
Again, it is very important that you pick the best Public Relations Specialist you can possibly find because a poor quality one will make the flame war last longer than it should. Also, you will find that poor quality specialists start apologizing just to shut people up, and once they know you are handing out apologies so freely, they will start finding things for you to apologize about.
Take the example of Cyberpunk 2077. The developers went out of their way to make the game as woke as possible, and they apologized for there not being enough Chinese people represented. After that, they were getting complaints because there were not enough Thai, Haitian, Cubans, and so forth. There was even a change.org post to get them to include Inuit people in the game. The developer started handing out apologies for stuff they shouldn’t have apologized for and it resulted in disaster.
You need a good PR specialist, you need the team at Star Media PR Group. Get in touch today for all the help you need to fix up your online reputation.
