How not to recover from a social media fail, feat Scarlett and Jo

Putting this all in one place for an easy read.

Scarlett and Jo have posted some ill advised comments tonight, which were bad but damage limitation could have helped, instead they decided to pour fuel on the fire – and when I say fuel, think more gunpowder than lighter fluid.

Here’s what started it.

Offensive use of the virgin/whore dichotomy, not exactly surprising for a brand owned by a man that a few of us have found unpleasant. But fairly run of the mill bad customer service.

What happened next is the interesting bit.

They, obviously, got called out on this awful response to a reasonable question. And they, predictably, failed to understand what they’d done wrong.

I’ve had to borrow screenshots for this next bit as they’ve been deleting comments all over the place in an attempt to claw back control. (eg. I looked at the replies a second ago and there were over 40, now there’s 33… correct that, 32, possibly less in the time it took me to type this)

As you can see it went from this (them admitting culpability)

to this

Now why might they be deleting those messages? Because, apparently, they were being trolled.

Apparently someone created a fake S&J account in order to post offensive messages (and apologies??) to their page. Some people believed this because
a) it was posted by “Scarlett Jo” not “Scarlett & Jo” – note the missing ampersand
b) it linked back to an empty personal profile page

Few things about how Facebook works, each page needs to be “owned” by a personal account. The owner of S&J does not have his own personal facebook account, or if he does it is not connected to the official S&J page.

It is possible (though frowned upon by facebook) to create a fake personal account purely to admin a page. It is also remarkably easy to post from the personal account on a page you own, I know I’ve commented on my MurderOfGoths page as Kathryn more than once.

So Gifi was posting, from a personal account rather than the page.

Once the idea had been planted that there’d been a hack though, Gifi obviously figured it was an easy way out. There was a complication of course, isn’t there always, some pesky sorts pointed out that it couldn’t be a troll as the same account had been posting on the brand page for a while, giving normal non-offensive customer service advice.

Could he really convince people that this troll had played a long game, pretending to help customers, learning enough about the brand to advise, just to post one (not particularly troll-y) comment which might not have been seen?

Things were spiralling out of control, there was anger everywhere, brand ambassadors were quitting, orders were being cancelled.

Two choices, apologise in a sincere manner, or pretend it was a troll? Surely the fatties would fall for that one!

Except, if you don’t know technology well then it’s pretty tough to fake a troll. He gave it his best shot, he created a decoy account, set it up exactly like the other personal account, same profile picture etc. Used that to post more offensive and/or surreal messages, redirected the older good messages so that if anyone clicked them they’d go straight back to the official page. All very convincing if you only look as far as the profile pictures.

But you can (and should) look deeper.

Here is the original offensive post.

The important bit of information is down there in the left bottom corner, that is the link that the username “Scarlett Jo” points to. The username is “scarlettjo15”.

And here “she” is. Check the URL at the top.

Now on to those positive customer services messages.

If Gifi is telling the truth and this offensive message is from a troll who is just spoofing the actual S&J account, then those messages should link back to a different user right?

Oops.

Looks like it’s that pesky scarlettjo15 again.

But look, Gifi says that the “troll” has had their account suspended.

Well, yes, because the latest posts were from an account which is a clone of the one that caused the original offence.

Suddenly no more link to scarlettjo15.

Here’s the thing, I know that facebook allows you to set a unique url for your personal page, here’s mine

But if you were to hastily set up a decoy account, you wouldn’t have set that, especially as you’d have to faff about getting the account verified (and yes, I have set up a fake account just to show you)

And your URL would look something like this

(Did you like my choice of name?)

So here you go, your step by step guide to how not to fake a trolling.

Also comes in video format, now with more swearing.

Enjoy.

Quick edit to add:

All of the apologies have been made by the supposed troll account.

Which means either

a) If it is a troll the Scarlett & Jo have never apologised for the original offensive message. FAIL

b) If it isn’t a troll, then they have and have just blown their cover. FAIL.

Either way, this isn’t looking good.

They’ve either shown themselves up to be unapologetic, or to be trying to bullshit their customers. So which is it Gifi?

Also, if it is a troll, why are they still posting when you can ban users from your page? If it was really a troll instead of a decoy account, made to confuse things, I’d have thought S&J would have wanted that banned pretty damn quick.