Wrap-up from my perspective for the Moli PR folks. It’s been painfully apparent since Dan’s miraculous discovery of spelling and subclauses that you’ve been involved in by-the-book damage limitation on this one. You may feel a little miffed that you had your shortcomings relative to the Internet pointed out to you. You may feel that it was just unlucky that Dan chose this blog to comment on. Maybe he should have looked at the author’s About / Portfolio / Resume pages and withheld comment. Maybe.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s not just people with Sabrina’s background that are au fait with the clunky workings of last century’s PR. Millions of people are.

Ask a savvy marketer and they’ll tell you that their audience is pretty much up to speed with any of the tactics they try and use. They know that there aren’t really any new tricks to be pulled on contemporary consumers, just variations on the classics (astroturfing has been around for quite some time). So the good marketers and advertisers got creative. The rest are still yelling into the void of marketing noise, but that’s another story.

As this happened to marketing communications in general, now it’s happening to PR. The Internet can be a scary place that often doesn’t behave the way a carefully crafted ‘engagement strategy’ would like it to. You need to realise this and figure out what your new role is in this dynamic, where customers can and will speak back in an uncontrolled environment. It certainly isn’t to churn out automaton-speak. If you’re concerned about covering your ass, you can do this and sound human at the same time. It just takes a little practice.

It’s sad that this blew up over a social networking site that had a great pitch combined with fortuitous timing in coming to market. I may have poked fun at some of the more outlandishly silly things that were done over the last few days, but I genuinely hope some lessons are learned. Maybe play a quick word association game with ‘social network’ – off the top of my head I get ‘people’, ‘friendly’, ‘communication’, ‘connection’.

Did I really just write that? ;-) I can has moar internetz fightz now pleez?

But considering the bits you compared and the use of “mis-information” by Hawk and “mis-represented” by Judy, I’m thinking both of their comments have been through the same soul-sucking, corporate PR machine. These people really, really need better PR.

And I’m with you on the bit where it bothers me that the president of a social network doesn’t know the difference between a post and a comment. I don’t think they’re obfuscating as much as they’re just, well, not that clued into the internet. You know, the place their business exists?

Hawk – “I will include my name and title in all posts about company information”
Judy – “include their name and title in all posts about company information”

Apart from the astounding similarity, this phrase is very carefully constructed. What is the difference between posts about the company, and posts about “company information”? Quite significant I would say. Can anyone from Moli enlighten me as to what the policy is on posts about the company and its awesomeness?

I’m also unsure about the absolute legal distinctions between posts, comments etc. If we were to be somewhat technical about this, using fairly commonly accepted terms, what Dan published under his nom de plume were comments, not posts.

“Mis-information” – I’d personally think that hyphenating this, whilst correct, is very much a minority usage. May be a US/UK difference though.

I’m surprised I didn’t notice this one earlier – why is Judy apologising to Mike’s readers?

The rest of the comment seems strangely slapdash compared to the first paragraph.

“Our company ‘s global headquarters are actually based in southern Florida were the majority of our 55 associates are based.”

1. “based” x 2
2. “were” should be where
3. first use of based is redundant, unless the global headquarters are mobile in some way.

“show you how are privacy features work”

Bingo bonus points for spotting this one …

I’m interested in your take on something, while we’re here. In reading back through these posts to, you know, relive the adventure, it occurred to me that Dan’s apology as Dan in the original post shares a great deal of phrasing with Judy’s TechCrunch post. What do you reckon?

Moli, look what you’ve done to me!

I’ve already mentioned the need for an ‘Idiot’s guide to anonymity on the Internet’. Do the good people at Moli.com really need a guide to hyperlinks as well? And search engines? And aggregators?

Do I need to explain that continuing on with the dissembling approach detailed above is MASSIVELY damaging to any brand? Far more so for an online brand and, here’s the kicker, potentially fatal for a brand whose key differentiating attribute is supposed to be its robust approach to online privacy.

Using the term ‘associate’ as a distancing tactic is so played out at this stage that it honestly amazed me to see it being attempted here. As Sabrina points out, and I also mentioned in another comment, you have no wriggle room here Judy. The office junior can’t be blamed. 3rd party agencies can’t be blamed.

In that comment I also advised Dan that crediting his customers’ intelligence was always a good thing. Insulting your customers’ intelligence outright is therefore a bad thing, okay? Slipping the snide “unintentional mis-representation” fabrication into your Techcrunch comment and not including it in your direct customer contact speaks volumes about your attitude towards your customers.

Here’s a quote I’m fond of, from Bill Bryson. “Most big companies don’t like you very much, except for hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don’t like you at all.” Adding your organisation to that list in your launch week is very, very dumb.

I regret not getting odds from a bookmaker when Sabrina first wondered how long it would take for mention of a transparent privacy policy to occur. After all, it is damage limitation step #1 as we’re all well aware here, the corporate equivalent of politicians establishing a committee to investigate the propensity of stable doors to mysteriously swing open in the night. I eagerly await the next instalment in this sorry mess …

Dear Judy:

For the love of God, please get yourself some PR advice that isn’t completely and totally lacking internet savvy. You’re in the business of social networks, yet MOLI.com is displaying no intelligence at all in the way social networking and reputation actually functions outside of your network architecture plan.

While it’s fine to ignore unflattering blog pieces about your company, when your own employee is then caught engaging in duplicitous behaviour in that blog’s comments, leading to the revelation of his true identity and a history of such behaviour, you do not wait 23 hours to deal with it. You get out of bed, you get your PR person out of bed, and you issue a statement immediately. If you PR person is not available at 7PM or 2 AM or whenever you need her for crisis management, you fire her.

When you finally do get around to responding and throw out buzzwords like “absolute transparency” you don’t keep that policy under lock and key; you make it publicly available to establish a baseline for your credibility and public accountability for that promise.

And when you’re committed to running a reputable business, you don’t let astroturfing comments shilling for your company stand uncorrected on Digg, TechCrunch and GetSatisfaction. You post a retraction, in public, on those sites, where the comments appears.

And then you issue a press release apologising to those sites that were duped by your former employee, emphasizing that this is not the way MOLI.com wants to do business or engage with internet users.

On a personal note, I would like to also add that when you finally do make a statement? You do not blame a blogger for publishing “mis-information” when the entire crisis was caused not by a blog piece, but by your own employee’s campaign of mis-information.

Welcome to the internet. Please treat it kindly.

– Sabrina