So Much Drama in the RB2B
Lessons in PR and Legal Actions
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If you’re a B2B marketer, there’s a good chance your LinkedIn feed this week was taken over with a feud between Adam Robinson (Founder/CEO of RB2B) and 6sense (and its law firm). For the uninitiated, here’s a quick synopsis:
6sense is one of the largest companies in its vertical (marketing data). It has raised over $500 million in funding. It has over 1,000 employees.
RB2B is (somewhat famously) a bootstrapped startup trying to revolutionize 6sense’s market by offering person-level web traffic data (as opposed to the standard company-level product). It’s LinkedIn profile lists 4 employees.
Adam has built much of RB2B’s marketing and his own personal brand on “building in public,” posting radically transparent videos and notes on LinkedIn, sharing both his startup’s successes and failures in equal measure. He has over 77,000 followers.
Late last week, Adam posted on LinkedIn that RB2B had purchased 6sense a year ago for competitive research purposes and that 6sense had just proposed a 3X price hike for his annual renewal. He then wrote a six bullet listicle of top reasons he thought they’d given him such a crazy high renewal price. He used those six bullets to either bash 6sense’s product, praise his, or both. The post was unusually raw for the staid world of execs on LinkedIn. It earned over 750 reactions and 450 comments, which is insane engagement even by Adam’s standards.
Tuesday night, Adam followed up with another post, featuring a six page cease and desist letter from Kelley Drye, 6sense’s counsel. The letter detailed claims against Adam based on violation of its terms of service (“TOS”) and federal and state laws prohibiting unfair and deceptive trade practices. The letter demanded Adam delete the offending post, replace it with an apology post, and tag every single commenter (over 400!) on the offending post in his new post. Unsurprisingly, he did not comply. Instead, Adam posted the letter and picked up the mantle of the little guy fighting the anti-competitive legal tactics of the “Billion Dollar Bullies.” As of this writing, this new post has over 1,300 reactions and over 850 comments. Over 95% of those comments are cheering Adam on. Some say they are now trying RB2B’s product.
There are at least two big lessons for B2B startups to learn from this episode. First, social is the best B2B PR. It’s been going that way for a decade. This episode has driven it home in a way few others could. Second, executives should remember that legal decisions are business decisions. Legal analysis is just step 1 of that decision making process.
Social is the best B2B PR
Depending on who your customers are, it could be a different platform, but I think for most B2B businesses, this means organic LinkedIn content is your PR (public relations) strategy. Traditionally, PR focused on putting press releases on “the wire” so that publications would pick up them up and distribute your story to their readers, or begging editors at those publications to interview your founders, or quote your experts, or publish or broadcast anything that got your name out in the world in a positive light.
But over the past couple of decades, first the internet and then social media have completely changed how people consume content. They’ve given every brand the ability to publish their own content. And the “social” nature of “social media” platforms has made that publishing just step one in a virtuous cycle of engagement with one’s target audience. Should brands still invest in getting coverage by third parties? Maybe. But the advantages of going direct are legion.
Control of Message
Adam never could have achieved this with traditional PR. No website worth pitching would have published his crazy “6Sense sucks and RB2B is great” listicle-disguised-as-pricing-complaint post. Having built a huge LinkedIn audience comprised largely of his ideal customers, he didn’t need them to. You don’t have to go as extreme as Adam to enjoy these benefits. In past roles, I’ve wasted tons of time and energy trying to get publications to cover even the most unobjectionable, significant news about my company. In the cases where we got coverage, there were usually compromises in messaging.
Authenticity over Objectivity
Other than their presumed superior audience size, another classic argument for getting coverage from third party media is the halo of objectivity their pieces enjoy. But for a whole host of reasons I won’t double click into here, Americans’ faith in the objectivity of media has fallen off a cliff. Instead, the American consumer is increasingly focused on authenticity. The implication is that everyone is biased, and as long as everyone is giving their own biased, but honest opinions, information consumers trust themselves to be the final arbiters of what is “true.”
Social media provides execs with far more opportunity for authentic communication than traditional PR. Taking Adam as an example, he regularly posts what appear to be off the cuff videos of himself reviewing company results, reading and responding to negative reviews, or directly addressing the arguments of his loudest data privacy critics (of which there are many!). Everyone of those videos (and his written posts) present him as a real person with emotions, vulnerabilities, a personality…all the stuff missing from press releases and even most “profile pieces” at a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring a PR firm.
Putting the “Relations(hips)” in “Public Relations”
The social nature of LinkedIn allows for (and at times almost demands) engaging in conversations with your audience in a way that is impossible through traditional PR. Honestly, doing this both authentically and at scale seems exhausting to me. But the payoff could be massive. Back to Adam’s recent posts - he’s replied to almost every single comment, which I can only imagine has made many of those posters feel like they know him on some level. He’s developed a friendly rapport with many of them. Some are self-avowed fans. People like to buy from people they know. They love to buy from people they like.
Quality and Measurability of Audience
In traditional PR, brands are at the mercy of publishers for vague statistics about who their audience is and how many of that audience has seen a particular piece. Never mind getting a feel for how the audience felt about the piece. On LinkedIn, brands get real time data on impressions and engagement, and can extrapolate sentiment from comments. They can also get an extremely detailed picture of who their audience is from the profiles of those engagements.
All of which is to say, if you’re a B2B startup spending six figures a year on a PR firm and aren’t really sure what you have to show for it, try investing a fraction of that budget in a good microphone for one or more of your executives, and hold them to a regular posting schedule.
Legal Decisions are Business Decisions
Given my law school background, this is a point near and dear to my heart. I don't know anyone at 6sense, and maybe I’m completely off-base. But my guess is that their exec team became “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” (to borrow from Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park).
It’s an understandable error. Imagine being 6sense’s CEO, reading Adam’s post last week, a post you believe is filled with deceptive or “literally false” (a legal term heavily featured in the cease and desist letter, and heavily derided in the LinkedIn comments) claims about your company. A post from some snot-nosed startup founder who is openly bragging about having bought your product just to flame it on social media. You would want to know “Can we sue them?” If such a suit could at least survive summary judgment, your attorneys will almost certainly say “Yes, you’ve got a good claim” (remember, they are paid by the hour…mo’ problems, mo’ money). You feel vindicated. Your cause is righteous. But you are magnanimous and rather than file a suit for injunctive relief or damages, you just send the snot-nosed startup founder a demand to fix the mess he’s created. Or else.
Any time a business exec is thinking about taking legal action, the legal analysis should be just one branch/gate of the overall decision making process. Something like:
Marginal gain of legal action = gains from legal action - attorney costs - other business costs (primarily PR)
In this case, I think 6sense shows a real lack of understanding of the “other business costs.” They demand Adam post an apology and correction…tagging everyone that commented in the post. So, they wanted Adam to create a post saying “I’m sorry, I said 6sense’s product data sucks, and that it’s scared of our person-level model, and that they were going to 3X our price, but none of those things were true” and tag 400+ LinkedIn profiles in it. Even compared to just allowing Adam’s original post to fade to black, do you think that would have improved or worsened their prospective customers’ perception of 6sense’s brand and products?
But the delta between the apology post and having no second post is not even the relevant comparison, as we now know. It’s wild to me, but maybe no one in the room at 6sense bothered to look through Adam’s profile before deciding to send him the letter. If they had, it would have been clear there was a very high percentage chance that he would view it not as a scary legal cost to be avoided but as PR gold. Which it has become.
So, baked into that “other business costs” you should have some significant brand damage among some significant portion of the very people you sell to. Adam’s cease and desist post has over 1,300 reactions as of this writing. Knowing Adam’s content, it’s safe to assume most are in 6sense’s target market. It’s hard to know how many impressions that reaction count represents, but the ratio for my own LinkedIn posts runs between 100 and 250 to 1. This is an extremely provocative post, so let’s take the lower estimate of 100 to 1 - so 100,000 LinkedIn profiles, mostly B2b tech marketing, sales, and product folks, have seen it. Ho. Ly. Shit.
In “Gains from legal action,” sending the letter gets you the expected benefit of…what? In the case where Adam complies, as we discussed above, I’m not sure a second post with an apology and tagging 400 profiles is a net positive for 6Sense.
In the case where he refuses (and parlays your letter into great PR for him), are you going to actually sue? How will you prove damages? Can any damages for which you’re likely to get a judgment compare to the real but impossible to calculate brand damage from 100K potential B2B buyers seeing Adam’s cease and desist post? I realize saying that the real damage on LinkedIn is magnitudes greater than the damages you can get from a court is strange, but I think that’s the reality.
Honestly, the best course of action here would have been to take up his claims of product superiority in your own posts and make a Coke vs Pepsi kind of challenge out of it. The audience would have loved it. The second best option would have been to shut up and let this fade from collective memory in 48 hours or so. News cycles are shorter than ever. This was pretty much the worst option.