Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to achieve a breakthrough at work — and build a career or company you love.
Someone attacked me on LinkedIn recently.
They claimed I’d made something up. They made a huge stink. I spent a long time in damage-control mode, trying to protect my reputation.
Today, I want to tell you how I resolved it.
To do this, I’ll teach you a concept I call The Battering Ram Effect. It’s a way of understanding what riles people up, why they can get so explosive online… and what finally neutralizes them.
If you’re going to do anything online, whether it’s build a business or just post on social, this is something you must understand. Because it’ll save you a lot of stress, and get you out of trouble.
But first, here’s the story of what happened to me…
She accused me of lying
I post a lot of marketing content on LinkedIn. Recently, I shared a print advertisement that I thought was smart, and some lessons people could learn from it. The post blew up — going past 500,000 impressions.
The next day, I got attacked by a user I’ll call Rachel.
Rachel left a comment accusing me of lying. She said I took an original ad, made a bunch of changes, and was now trying to fool people for attention.
Dozens of other people had already commented on my post, saying they liked it. She replied to them all individually, telling them that I’m a liar.
I panicked. Had I messed up? I quickly researched the issue, and was assured: I’d done nothing wrong. I had truly no idea what she was talking about.
I started defending myself in the comments. Then I remembered: No, nothing gets resolved like this. If I’m going to solve this, it must happen directly and personally.
Why people get so angry online
Let’s back up for a second and ask: Why do people go ballistic online?
Here’s my belief: It’s because everyone can speak online, but people rarely feel heard.
Consider it. Everyone has a voice on social media, and everyone is technically reachable. You can DM your favorite celebrity or comment on your favorite brand!
But the digital world is also noisy and full of invisible filters. Your favorite celebrity probably won’t see your DM, and your favorite brand might not monitor its comments.
This is a difficult contradiction. Humans crave being heard. So when someone is upset, they think to themselves: I won’t be heard unless I’m extremely loud. Then they amplify everything — their words, their actions, and their emotions.
It’s like they showed up at your home with a battering ram, because they assumed you won’t open the door.
Here’s how I always imagine it:
So to defuse the situation, you must do something that feels very counterintuitive: You must open the door.
Because when someone wants to knock a door down, and that door swings wide open for them instead, they have no idea what to do. Then you’re able to re-control the situation. That’s the Battering Ram Effect.
How to open the door
To be clear: I’m not saying to engage with everyone who gets angry on social media. Sometimes people are irrational and you’ll never win. It’s not worth the effort.
But I believe most people actually can be satisfied. That’s because, deep down, they just want to be heard.
I once interviewed Michael Dell, who’s now the fifth-richest person in the world. Many people doubted or criticized him, believing that his company would fail. I asked him how he handled that.
I loved his answer: “The first question to ask is ‘Is there anything that can be learned constructively from this, or is it just people spewing off nonsense?’”
In other words: When people attack you, don’t get swept up in the emotion of it. Just engage on the facts. Do they have a point? Was there a mistake you can correct, or an error you can acknowledge? If so, engage.
I do this all the time. For example, sometimes I get testy emails from newsletter readers, who disagreed with something I wrote. I always reply, acknowledge that they have a fair point (even if I disagree), and then share a little more of my perspective. In turn, they say how much they appreciate that I heard them out.
Again, that’s all they wanted: to feel heard.
Now here’s what happened with Rachel
To recap: On LinkedIn, Rachel publicly accused me of being a liar.
Then I sent her a DM. Instead of arguing with her, I just stuck to the facts: She claimed that I’d altered an advertisement, so I asked her to please send me the original ad.
She replied quickly. And look at how she began:
“Thank you for reaching out to me! I made a comment on your post that you didn’t respond to, so I was compelled to let everyone else know that they’d been tricked.”
See that? It’s the battering ram! She didn’t feel heard, so she came in hot. Then she kept at it. She asked me to publicly apologize for my error. “It’s okay to be wrong,” she told me by DM. “Just own it.”
This might sound like a failure. But it’s not. She was still in angry mode, and I was still trying to assess the facts. As Michael Dell asked: Is there anything to be learned here?
So again, I ignored the emotional stuff. (Never get upset! Never take the bait! Never, never, never.) I just said that if something was wrong, I’d want to fix it — but I can’t find the “original ad” anywhere. So could she please help me?
Four hours later, her tone changed.
“Oh my word, I am so sorry!” she wrote me.
She admitted that she was wrong. She’d gotten confused about the ad, because of something she’d read a while ago. “I got really riled up and I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you personally,” she wrote me. “This was a lesson I will remember for the future.”
Then she deleted all her comments on my post. The problem was solved.
What did we learn here?
To me, it’s simple:
If I’d ignored Rachel, I would have looked like I was hiding something.
If I argued with her in public, we might both look like jerks.
But by contacting her directly and making her feel heard, I defused the situation. That’s when she was able to step back and and realize that she was in the wrong! And if she’d been correct all along, I would have fixed the mistake.
If you’re going to engage online, you must remember: Most people are just craving your ear. They will shout to reach you over the noise. It might look and feel aggressive, but it’s happening because they feel lost.
You cannot fight battering rams with other battering rams. You fight them with an open door and a welcome mat.
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