by by Cyrus Heffernan
Twitter: @czheff
Like it or not, social media is an essential part of every 21st-century business, and with it comes the potential for a PR disaster. Organizational PR crises come in several different flavors, and while some have a certain amount of prior warning (creeping and slow-burn crises), here we’ll take a look at every social media manager’s nightmare: The sudden, unexpected crisis.
Bernstein Crisis Management defines a Sudden Crisis as a situation where “… damage has already occurred and will get worse the longer it takes to respond.” Every organization must be prepared to address such an issue when the time comes – they should be able to respond in a timely manner to the problem, but respond in the right way. Here are a few (graded by me!) examples of the right way, the wrong way, and the “what-on-earth-were-you-thinking” way.
KitchenAid
In October 2012 (right around election time), KitchenAid USA’s official Twitter account sent out the following unfortunate message: “Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 2 days b4 he became president’. #nbcpolitics.”
Ouch.
Fortunately, KitchenAid was quick to recognize and address the issue, posting an apology to its followers within minutes, and a personal apology to President Obama a few hours later. The tweet turned out to be mistakenly sent by an employee intending to use their personal account to express their, um, interesting political opinions, and KitchenAid immediately assured the public that this person would no longer be in charge of its Twitter feed. The damage was done, but KitchenAid quickly took responsibility, corrected its mistake, and was able to move on relatively unscathed.
Crisis Management Grade: A
ChapStick
Back in 2011, ChapStick posted a fairly innocuous pic to its Facebook page of a girl frantically searching behind her couch for her precious lip balm. A blogger, disgusted by what they saw as objectifying content, voiced their concern about the image. Followers began to post negative comments on the picture. A lot of negative comments. ChapStick knew they had to respond to the situation. So what did they do? They deleted the comments.
Uh-oh.
As one can imagine, this just fanned the flames. As followers noticed their comments being deleted, they continued to comment, then those comments were deleted, so they left more comments… You see where this is going.
Eventually, ChapStick realized this couldn’t go on any longer. They posted an apology and removed the image, promising to be “committed to the dialogue.” However, they seemed to place a lot of the blame for the situation on the commenters, saying they would continue to remove posts with foul language or repetitive complaints. In the end, no one was really happy – ChapStick responded, but at first inappropriately (censorship is rarely the right course of action), and even in the end underwhelmingly.
Crisis Management Grade: C-
The Secret Plumber
23-year-old Edinburgh plumber James Hogg, aka “The Secret Plumber,” got a crash course in how rapidly social media can cause a crisis to spin out of control. In late 2013, a resident of the city had a near-accident with a Secret Plumber company van, so she took to Twitter to express her displeasure with The Secret Plumber’s driving: “Massive thanks to @secret_plumber van for almost driving in the back of me. At nine months pregnant. I really appreciate that.” Another Twitter user encouraged her to report Hogg to the authorities for reckless driving. Now, the right course of action here would be to apologize, or just not engage. But did James Hogg do either of those things? No. Oh, no.
In response to the suggestion that he be reported, Hogg tweeted: “report what u bunch of fannys? Ur shite driving lets go.” He continued to respond to tweets and Facebook comments with an increasingly colorful string of insults, ranging from “fatarse” to “shagged by a clown.”
If Hogg had taken a look at this site, he could have become a member of Plumbers Success International and used the tools and training on offer to help his business succeed. I’m sure he would have learned that this was definitely not the way for success. But thankfully, for every plumber like Hogg, there are good, honest and hard-working plumbers in Newton or anywhere else who you can trust to do the work on your house and not drive like a fool or abuse you on social media. You just need to do detailed research, and perhaps read reviews online to learn about other people’s experiences. You can check out some of the good plumbers by following the link.
Eventually, Hogg somehow saw through the haze of his online rage and realized that maybe, just maybe, this was not the best way to endear potential customers to his business. He posted an apology online, claiming that his phone was hacked, and that he wasn’t very good at Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, he was investigated by local police, and as of 2017 there is no evidence that The Secret Plumber is still up and running. Shame – he seemed like a charming lad.
Crisis Management Grade: F-. See me after class.
The best company’s crisis management strategy is one that never has to use it!
This was a great read! We are lucky to have been provided with the opportunity to learn about social media crisis management in class at the SOJC. As a result, it is so painfully obvious when companies have not been armed with the same skill set to deal with impending or sudden crises. Miscommunication or misinterpreted messaging can happen to anyone. What is important, however, is how soon and how gracefully the organization responds to the inevitable firestorm. The internet is many things, but forgiving of poor crisis management is not one of them.
In SOJC, we’ve talked about how social media is a “digital habitat” for open and public conversations to occur. Social media a real place where actual people can communicate with one another. In the end, millions of people inhabit these digital habitats, and brands hop in to advertise to the people.
Brands have readily adopted using social media as a medium for engagement and advertising WITHOUT changing their old mindset of one-way communication from traditional print and televised media. If brands fail to changed their philosophical understanding of marketing conversation with social media (think Cluetrain), they are easy prey for a social media firestorm. I am thinking of the Chapstick case, where they created content that went sour, and tried to control outcomes and image by deleting the engagement that manifested itself.
I found this post highly entertaining! It blows my mind that some company’s would think to post certain things on social media, knowing that they will most likely back lash. It’s like they are asking for a public relations disaster. Yes the posts these brands make can be bad, but the way that they try to resolve the problem can make the brand/company look even worse. Your three examples are perfect ways to represent that. Everyone will interpret a post differently, but every interpretation should be taken into account before making the social media post public. Which most companies don’t seem to do. Loved this!
– Sarah Johnson
First off, Cyrus Heffernan, I like the way you write. You drew me in with your conversational style and made me stay with your simple and witty format, “Crisis Management Grade: F-. See me after class.”
Second, these are all great examples of what Joey Jaraczewski commented on, the fact that we live in a world of multiple “habitats,” and social media is just one of them and organizations must act accordingly if they don’t want to get shut out of the conversation. Each social media communication blunder you showcased was handled by the organization with different levels of tact and environmental awareness (or lack thereof). As a generation that has seen the birth and growth (and sometimes the timely death) of many social media platforms, it is easier for us to see the full potential of social media marketing, but some organizations are convinced that they can continue a one-way level of communication through this channel. You need only look at your feed on any given social channel to see messages being pushed on you in a very traditional marketing manner. The organizations that engage us in their messaging/advertising, and respond genuinely and actively to us, they are the ones that win our respect and brand loyalty. This is the case with companies like Nike, Ospry, and Patagonia.
As students at the SOJC have the opportunity and the knowledge to encourage more organizations to participate in two-way communication with its stakeholders on social media and I think this blog highlights that fact.
Great post Cy!
First of all, what kind of name is The Secret Plumber anyways? Because I definitely don’t want this guy coming anywhere near my pipes. Also, if you claim to be “bad” at Facebook and Twitter, then would it be better for a small business to just NOT have Facebook and Twitter? More research required…
With the KitchenAid example, this happens all too often. Employees forgetting to log out of the company account and back into their personal accounts. Is there a way to safeguard against this? Has Twitter come out with a feature that asks “Hey you, yeah you, are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to post this on the company page?!” … Person clicks yes, then another pop up asks “Just in case… one more time… YOU SURE BOUT THAT?”. I probably need this feature on my own social accounts tbh, but think of the Crisis that this could prevent!
Thanks for the read. Virtual fist bump.
I loved reading all these studies and write-ups about these crisis situations. I’ve recently been very in to researching different crisis situations and how they developed and how they were resolved! I think my favorite crisis situation most recently would have to be the KFC situation. If you haven’t read about it I’ll link it but it is worth the read. KFC was able to turn around a shortage of chicken at some of their locations (that resulted in closure) and come up with a PR stunt and an ad that made a sticky situation funny. Not all crises can end up the way KFC’s did, nor can they, but the way that they handled it was immaculate.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/kfc-chicken-shortage-gravy-stowga-startup