Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Crisis Communications from the PR Experts
Since the whole Moli.com thing, I’ve been thinking about what they could have done better. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about what someone in PR might think of the whole thing, and how the real PR experts punching way above Moli’s weight class might have managed a similar issue.
Recently I found at least one version of the answer in B.L. Ochtman’s blog. While I was busy chastising Moli.com, social media strategy consultant BL was busy being emailed to death by Adacio and – wait for it – PR Week, which bills itself as “the online resource for up to the minute Public Relations and PR Jobs”:
The irony of the fact that my trip to email hell for the past two days was caused by a PR company is not lost.
But that’s pretty much the only funny thing about the “mistake” Adicio.com made when they sent out 3200+ emails to an OPEN list of PR Week newsletter subscribers and then re-sent that message and the passwords of everyone on the list to each person as many as 1000 times over the next 24 hours.
PR Week set up a portal page relating to “the incident.” Editor-in-Chief Julia Hood issued an apology on the PR Week US website, as did contractor Adicio. They even appear to have covered their own story. All of that, on paper, is at first glance excellent and transparent management of a PR crisis. However, according to their own version of events:
PRWeek first posted an apology letter from Adicio on Tuesday evening. Editor- in-chief Julia Hood followed up with a personal e-mail and apology to all affected parties on Wednesday night.
Wednesday? Wednesday night? This amazes me. These are PR people, talking to other PR people, and yet they seem unable to manage their own bloody PR in the aftermath of a major cock up. I mean, what exactly was Julia doing for 48 hours? Was there some other, more pressing issue she needed to be dealing with in her capacity as the editor of an online-only resource for “up the minute” PR? Was she drinking mojitos at DEMO with Judy?
The PR Week story on their own crisis is, ironically, tagged crisis communications. When browsing through some of those articles, I was astounded to find lots of holding forth about how the old rules don’t apply any more, but virtually nothing about how to actually respond to crisis in a 24/7 digital world. No wonder poor Julia didn’t seem to know how to move any faster.
The only thing they seem to have done right is responded to B.L. Ochman’s posted blog demand for a $161 refund for the Microsoft Office 2008 she had to buy after the “incident” rendered Word and Entourage unusable, and one of the iPods they talked about in every one of the thousands of emails they sent her over and over again.
PR Week’s response? Julia Hood called B.L. to tell her PR Week was FedExing a cheque and one of the iPods that was the prize in the errant emails. That, at least, is doing something.
Judy Balint at Moli.com please take note: I’d quite like an iPod Touch.
03 Feb 2008
| In: Marketing | Tags:MOLI.com
I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.
03.02.2008, 3:13 amThat’s another good ‘un.
Still, the explanation leaves a bit to be desired. What is “an automated software migration package”? Is it something that sounds plausibly scary enough to the non-technical? Because I certainly can’t find any reference to one on the entire Internet that isn’t in relation to this story.
So ‘null points’ for reaction times, particularly considering the volume of mail involved. Perhaps it took that amount of time to think up the phrase “automated software migration package”.
Since there’s obviously a market for these things, whatever they may be, I will commence work on building a prototype ASAP.
04.02.2008, 10:47 pmThe best crisis communications I’ve ever heard of was around this time last year in the US. Jet Blue airlines (think US Ryanair) had a lot of planes grounded due to bad weather. Customers were recording video diairies of their bad experience and uploading to youtube.
What did Jet Blue do?
Instead of issuing a vacuous press statement, they issued an apology by the CEO – a genuine, heartfelt apology – on youtube. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_PIg7EAUw
Check out the responses. People are sticking up for Jet Blue. And most importantly, the video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Way better than any press release would ever be read!
That’s my favourite crisis communications example ever!!
05.02.2008, 8:47 amMaryrose, I like that as a strategy. If that’s where everyone is talking about your fuckup, then that’s where you want to stage your mea culpa.
I would be interested to know how much later it hit YouTube. The time lag issue seems to be a big one with these large corps.