Jared Stauffer business, technology, family and faith

The Downside of Being Ethical

Doing the right thing is usually not the easiest thing to do.  This is no secret, but when you go through a situation where you make the right decision and get heck for it... it reminds you of how difficult it can be.

We are running a giveaway at br.st, our web-based Twitter client.  We were a little disappointed with the press coverage we got at launch in mid-November.  So we decided to do a giveaway to spread the word.  It was always our hope that the people who won each giveaway would have a lot of followers, but the way we chose to pick the winners was by random drawing.

The first three Wii giveaways went to people with a low number of followers, but it wasn't until the first Mac giveaway on Friday that we started to get heat for the winner.  Again we did a random drawing and the winner again had a low number of followers and was a low use account.

No one wanted the winner of our first big giveaway, a MacBook Pro, to go to someone who had a large number of followers more than us.  At this point we had to make an ethical decision, but there was only one way go on this one.

So we announced the winner and almost immediately started catching heat, but we knew we made the right decision.

The Downside

1. You can't game the outcome.
2. Some people may not like you.
3. People may criticize, ridicule, or make stuff up about you.
4. You may question yourself.

The Upside

1. Your conscience is clear.
2. You don't have to make up other stuff to cover up your first lie / unethical decision.
3. At least you / your company are getting talked about.  Bad press = good press ??

How did we deal with it?

So now we knew we made the right decision and were catching flack for it.  How did we handle it?

Don't take it personally. As much as it pained me to read people tweet that they thought we were running a scam or giving it to ourselves, I had to not take it personally and react from this offense.

Defend yourself, but only to a point. We reacted to the criticism with tweets and a blog post.  But we had to leave it at that.  You have to pick a point to stop reacting because at times a continued defense only emboldens the offense and it is difficult to not let it get personal.

Listen to the reasonable critiques, ignore the harsh stuff. The reasonable critiques will give you valuable information on how you can improve, but the harsh comments just need to be ignored.

The reality is that people will always find something to criticize about you.  Remember this, if you are being criticized it means you showed up, you tried, you gave it a go - a lot of people don't even try.

- Jared (Follow me on Twitter - @JaredStauffer)

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