Cheryl Rios is perhaps the boldest person yet to come forward with her biggest PR misstep, reports Forbes. Hers is somewhat recent, and so the pain is still fresh. Rios is an integrated marketing specialist in Dallas, Texas. In April 2015, she put up a post on social media that stated her personal opinion, in a fairly mercurial way, about the upcoming presidential election. Her remarks were picked up by the national press.
Her lesson: “Do not think your personal social media is personal, as anyone can copy your post and push it out on their own social media as well. You represent your clients, and your posts will affect them, which I didn’t even think of—I had thought it was just me, on my own social media page, saying what I felt.”
Most painful of all is that when the aftermath hit the press, Rios’ clients were attacked along with her, as their logos and names appeared on her company site. In the aftermath she lost two of her largest accounts, costing her business $8,000 a month.
To undo the damage, Rios removed all logos and client names from her company’s websites. She also took down all of her personal social media accounts as the floodgate of messages became hateful. Thankfully, within 4-5 days the storm had passed and it was “as if I didn’t exist,” she recalls. When her accounts went back up, minus the post, her life was normal again.
Except for the lost business. “This situation was a learning experience in that it’s also taught me to not get too comfortable; to always be selling and building my business.” Has she fully recovered? “I am in process,” she says. “Thankfully, I merged with an amazing company to create Elite Creative Partners. We are building up our clientele and things are going well.”
