I Thought This Post Would Get Me Cancelled

Last night I posted something I was pretty sure would go badly for me.

I asked, publicly, why salons and clinics are shit-talking their clients on social media. Not in a DM or a private group, but on my own grid with my name on it, in an industry where everybody knows everybody and where I will almost certainly be standing next to some of these people at the next industry event.

I hovered over the post button for a while. I fully expected a round of “lighten up, Tamara”, a few people telling me I’d lost my sense of humour somewhere between the brand side and the keynote stage, and an eye-roll toward being the industry’s fun police.

What actually happened

Twelve hours later the post has been seen more than 8,400 times, and the comments are running at somewhere close to 99% agreement.

Not agreement in the polite, heart-emoji sense either. Therapists, salon owners, educators and clients all saying versions of the same thing, which is that they’ve noticed it too, that it makes them uncomfortable, and that they’ve never quite known how to say so.

I went to bed braced for a pile-on and woke up to something closer to a sigh of relief.

Ours is a small industry, and small industries are very good at silence.

When the person you’re disagreeing with is two seats away at the awards or exhibiting opposite you in August, the safest thing to do with a strong opinion is keep it in the group chat. So most of us do, and the practices nobody will defend out loud carry on undisturbed, because disagreement gets read as an attack and nobody wants to be the one who started something.

That’s the calculation I was making at 8pm, and it’s the same calculation I watch people in this industry make every single day with thinking far better than mine.

Here’s what I think that 99% means, and it isn’t that I was right.

It means this industry already holds a standard about how we talk about the people who pay us, and nobody had said it out loud, so everybody assumed they were the only one bothered by it. The loudest version of a behaviour is almost never the most common one, it’s just the one that gets posted, and the quiet majority had been sitting there reading those posts and wincing without a single person naming it.

That’s worth sitting with if you’ve got an opinion you’ve been holding back, because the silence you’re reading as consensus is usually just everybody else doing exactly what you’re doing.

Set aside whether it’s kind for a moment, because the business case is simpler and harder to argue with.

Your salon’s social media audience is your client base. The woman who books the 9am Saturday, the one who rebooks every six weeks, the one who picks up the retail on her way out, she is sitting in your followers reading everything you post. So is the woman who hasn’t booked yet and is deciding whether to.

When that woman reads a post mocking the client who ran late, or asked for a discount, or changed her mind about her colour, she does not read it as a joke about somebody else. She reads it as a preview of how she’ll be spoken about the day she’s five minutes behind, and she quietly decides not to risk it. You have shown her exactly how you talk about people when they aren’t in the room, and no amount of beautiful before-and-afters undoes that.

I want to be clear that I understand the urge completely.

This work is relentless, clients can be maddening, and every single person who has ever stood behind a bed or a chair has had a day where they needed to say something unrepeatable. That is what the staff room is for, and the group chat, and the drive home with your best friend on speaker. It has always lived there, and it should.

A business page is a shopfront. It is the window your next client looks through before she decides whether to walk in, and the two have never been the same thing.

And if the audience you truly want is the industry rather than the clients, then go and build that audience somewhere it belongs. Start a profile in your own name, gather the people who get the joke, and talk to them there. That’s not a compromise, it’s just putting the right content in front of the right room, which is the whole discipline of this job.

I learned two things in twelve hours.

The first is that the standard was already there, held BTS by thousands of people who assumed they were alone in holding it, which means the behaviour I was worried about calling out is far less representative of this industry than the feed makes it look.

The second is more useful to anyone reading this who has an opinion they’ve been sitting on. I was wrong about the risk. The thing I thought would cost me goodwill is the thing that earned the most of it, because people are desperate for somebody to say the obvious thing kindly and without naming names.

So if you’ve been holding something back because you’re worried about who might see it, that’s usually the exact thing worth working out how to say.