How to be Vulnerable in your Brand Storytelling.
Are you scared of showing weakness on social media? Of admitting you made a mistake?
I was talking with my young adult son about the homeless in Vancouver and what the city needs to be doing about it, at one point he says to me, “Let me understand this. My empathetic mother who understands what others go through and cries when they share their stories, doesn’t empathize with the homeless? This is what I’m hearing right now.”
This felt like a punch in the gut. My response was defensive because I do care about their situation. “Mom, you’re sympathetic but you have no empathy for them.” What was the difference and why were my solutions to the homeless situation reflecting a lack of empathy?
Sympathy is not Empathy
As my son pointed out it is important to understand the difference between sympathy and empathy to know how to elicit the right reaction in your brand storytelling.
Sympathy is feeling of pity or sorrow for other people who are experiencing a negative event in their lives. You don’t have to understand their pain to feel bad for them and wish they weren’t going through it. When you sympathize you don’t fully understand what they are going through and do not feel their pain or joy deep in your soul.
Empathy is an Understanding
Empathy is more than sympathy because you understand how another person feels and why they feel that way. When you empathize with someone else, you feel what they feel and understand what they are going through. You are able to connect because you have a shared experience, even if it was different events with similarities.
Empathy and Storytelling
When we tell stories we create a space for people to become more empathetic because they start to understand the other side of the issue. At the same time, people need to have empathy to place themselves within the story, put themselves in the shoes of the main character. Without it, they are disconnected from the story and the plight of the characters.
To connect your brand story with your audience you need to create opportunities for them to feel empathy and identify with the person you are talking about. To do this, you need to understand who your audience is and lead them using a brand story digital funnel to guide them deeper into the story.
This isn’t easy and takes a bit of trial and error.
When a Vulnerability Story Goes Wrong
In the summer of 2022, Braden Wallake, CEO of, HyperSocial posted a photo of him crying on LinkedIn and shared his story about how laying off 2 employees made him upset. His post went viral for all the wrong reasons.
He meant to tell a story about how leaders don’t take laying off others lightly and they feel sadness too…. The result was instant vilification, and the post went viral as people made fun of his vulnerability and tears.
Most people did not empathize with him, nor did they felt any sympathy because of how he told his story. When writing a vulnerable story — how you write it matters so keep reading to find out how you can write your story without getting vilified.
“This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share. I’ve gone back and forth whether to post this or not.
We just had to layoff a few of our employees. I’ve seen a lot of layoffs over the last few weeks on LinkedIn.
Most of those are due to the economy, or whatever other reason. Ours? My fault. I made a decision in February and stuck with that decision for far too long.
Now, I know my team will say that “we made that decision together”, but I lead us into it. And because of those failings, I had to do today, the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do.
We’ve always been a people first business. And we always will be. Days like today, I wish I was a business owner that was only money driven and didn’t care about who he hurt along the way.
But I’m not. So, I just want people to see, that not every CEO out there is cold-hearted and doesn’t care when he/she have to lay people off.
I’m sure there are hundreds and thousands of others like me. The ones you don’t see talked about. Because they didn’t lay off 50 or 500 or 5000 employees. They laid off 1 or 2 or 3. 1 or 2 or 3 that would still be here if better decisions had been made. I know it isn’t professional to tell my employees that I love them.
But from the bottom of my heart, I hope they know how much I do. Every single one. Every single story. Every single thing that makes them smile and every single thing that makes them cry. Their families. Their friends. Their hobbies.
I’ve always hire people based on who they are as people. People with great hearts, and great souls. And I can’t think of a lower moment than this.”
When I read this post, I see a story about a leader who made a decision that resulted in having to let two people go and he is taking responsibility for it.
So, why did it get vilified?
Some people were probably triggered due to their own laid offs. Most people are not leaders and cannot identify with someone who must make these hard decisions, so they cannot empathize with him. A lot of them were jumping on the viral trend to get their own brands in front of people, thinking that’s the way to build a brand and get followers.
I think the main reason is because his story structure cast him as a victim disguised as a hero and this screams, please feel sorry for me, even if that isn’t the purpose or objective.
How to Tell a Vulnerable Story of Social Media
How could Braden Wallake structured his story to garner sympathy and empathy instead of being vilified?
First, he needed to take the emotional out of the story by waiting until the worst of the emotions has passed. Then once written, don’t post it, give it a couple of days and then go and edit it to ensure you are not using emotional woe is me language in the story.
Second, he should have told a story of empathy for his employees not how he felt about letting them go. He needed to use the pronoun ‘I’ less and ‘them’ more.
Third, his self-importance or ego — Calling himself a CEO sounds pretentious and he offers himself up as a foil against CEOs of larger companies. By setting himself up as a CEO instead of a small business owner, the public easily transferred their anger at CEOs of large organizations to him.
Fourth, the photo of him crying was a blatant cry for sympathy, but he didn’t experience uncertain loss caused by someone else in power. He was the person who held the power. It also goes against society’s belief that leaders, especially male leaders, shouldn’t cry. We want strong leaders whom we can trust to lead us through the tough times.
Fifth, he needed to be the hero, not the victim in this story. He had to make a tough choice for the sake of his company and those who still work for him, it was a tough decision and not one he took lightly, but — THIS IS VITAL — he is not the victim of circumstance in this story. He is the one with the power over others. His failure to get clients resulted in him having to let others go… They are the victims. He is the hero in the story… and his story is not yet over.
The good news, due to his story, the two people he had to lay off got a lot of attention from companies looking to hire someone.
There is no doubt that those who make the hard decision to let others go through negative emotions in the process because they know they have negatively affected the lives of many people, but they are not the victim of circumstance.
The reason Braden Wallake was vilified on social media is because he told the story from the point of view of a victim and people were not empathetic to his situation, after all, he still had a job, a company, and those he let go were the ones with the uncertain future. Audiences identified with those who were let go because they either have been let go in the past and know how it feels or they fear being let go and can sympathize.
Now, those who created satire posts about, Braden Wallake, have shown themselves as being cruel and unsympathetic individuals who jump on trends and only care about getting follows and likes. So, in the end, those who pushed the post into the sphere of viral — became villains in the process.
If you want people to have empathy, it must have details others can relate to. So, think about which details others will have experienced and include them instead of details that are only applicable to you.
Telling an emotionally charged story, be it negative or positive emotions, can create opportunities for our audiences to become empathetic to our brand and thereby creating stronger connections with them. However, if done wrong, it can have negative affects as people who have their own selfish agendas corrupt your story for their own gains. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need to write the story when you aren’t emotional and structure the story to the benefit of others with you are either the hero, (personal brand stories) or as guide, (business brand stories).
In my conversation with my son, I admitted that my opinion of the homeless situation comes from a place of misunderstanding and sympathy. To gain empathy, I need to understand why they are there and what they want for their own lives instead of coming at the problem from an “I know better” approach to fix it based on what I’d want if I was in their shoes. The only way I will truly understand is to end up living in a tent or listen to the stories of those who are homeless. That is why stories are so important, they give us what we need to better understand what others go through and feel.
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