#FAIL is not the objective

It occurs to me that in today’s world the consumer has gained the upper hand against corporations that aren’t quite living up to their marketing and PR images. What’s interesting is how social media can turn a simple grievance against a company quickly into a bad PR day for them.

In the July 20-July 27, 2009 Issue of Computerworld, Bart Perkins of Leverage Partners relays to his audience the story of the YouTube Video “United Breaks Guitars” where the band Sons of Maxwell put into music and video their experience on United. During a layover they watched United employees damaging their instruments. When notified United didn’t live up to their “fly the friendly skies” mantra and refused the claim. 1.5 million views and 10,000 comments later United finally reacted. Now the band had more than a simple grievance against United since according to the article a very valuable guitar was broken. So why did it take a viral video hitting 1.5 million views for United to care? Did they think they were too big to respond to a YouTube video? Was it not reaching the right people in United? When they did respond it was in a simple rhyming lyric that probably took a summer intern a couple of minutes to write. Bart Perkins called the video “viral revenge” and notes that companies in these situations should not fall prey to “least said, soonest mended mind-set”. He’s right companies need to act quickly and logically. Both do not seem to happen all that often.

The next case came from CNN during that Saturday night when Twitter was a buzz on a single topic #iranelections. I myself was glued to twitter watching pictures, videos and posts coming out of the country. Then right in front of me I saw a company take a small misstep. That small misstep turned into a bad night of PR for CNN. Now to be fair CNN took a hit that the entire cable news genre should have taken. While people were watching event unfold live most cable news shows were showing reruns. So here is how the events unfolded as I saw them from my laptop screen that Saturday night. First off people started to mention that no news networks were showing any coverage. The irony that social media followers still wanted to see some old school media for the news was interesting but I digress. Finally someone mentioned that CNN was showing a Larry King rerun with the OCC chopper guys on it and others started to comment. OK at this point people were thinking that cable news as a whole was dropping the ball not just one company. Then it happened. I’m not sure of the exact trigger. Some say a CNN personality on twitter was asked about the coverage and gave an answer that sounded passive. A new hashtag appeared in the stream #cnnfail and it basically followed the #iranelections hashtag for the rest of the night. In fact searching the hashtag reveals that 3 hours ago someone used the two hashtags together. Imagine your company being linked the hottest news topic on Twitter as a FAIL. This is not where we want to see companies end up. So what happened? CNN is on Twitter and typically they are on top of breaking news. To me, they failed the logical response to the negative publicity. It would have been a quick but nice response from CNN on twitter respond to what they were doing about the coverage. Just letting people know they were doing something could have changed the perception.

So what do you do when you find yourself staring down some bad social media publicity. Don’t panic think through the situation and logically come to a response in a timely manner. PR firms that are connected to social media are going to be the best people for companies that need this type of response. Actually, if they hired the right firms upfront they may not have gotten to this situation in the first place. PR firms connected to social media understands how the crowded reacts making them better capable of generating a response. Companies need to monitor their name online which is easily done through web searches, RSS feeds and other tools. Remember by choosing not to react companies are putting themselves in a situation where they will lose the public debate.