The social media and PR agency perspective.

Our last post discussed five signs that your company will face a PR crisis.  Let’s turn lemons into lemonade, and share five signs that your company will instead avoid a PR crisis.

• You know who your stakeholders are.  Depending on how you generate commerce, your stakeholders — the people who care the most and will react swiftly to your business moves — must be front and center when it comes to messaging.  Your particular stakeholders could be customers, clients, regulators, business partners, subsidiaries, parent companies, and so many more.  If you’ve identified and prioritized stakeholders, you’ll know who needs (re)assurance before anyone else.

• You’ve got a holding statement in place.  If/when things go bad, or from bad to worse, you’ve at least got some boilerplate language to help your company buy time until the next move.  This language can help guide immediate press releases, talking points, social media content, and more.

• You’re monitoring social media posts.  People can say a lot of nasty and awful things on a company’s official Facebook page.  If you avoid letting such comments linger, you’ll likely prevent your social media channels from becoming lightning rods for criticism.

• You admit mistakes when they happen.  Instead of stonewalling or ignoring the situation when your company steps in it, you quickly take control and explain immediate steps to make things better.  Amazing how this process always seems to work, and yet some companies still fear owning the situation!

• You realize life goes on.  If you were asked which of the following makes you think of Wendy’s restaurants — (1) “Where’s the beef?” or (2) the San Jose incident — you’ll likely go with 1.  The San Jose incident was a very embarrassing media episode the restaurant chain faced in 2005, and seemingly one that should have doomed the restaurant for quite some time.  And yet, chances are the 1980s’ mega-ad slogan will always prevail as top of mind when it comes to Wendy’s.  In crisis PR, the bad will almost always inevitably pass.  Best to let go of it and return to the core of your business.

Just about every company, regardless of industry, will experience an embarrassing PR episode.  Here are five signs one’s heading your way.

• You haven’t created a crisis PR plan.  No chain of command, no idea who’s in charge, no idea where the communications weak points are.  Sound like your business’s PR approach?  Then you likely haven’t taken time to build a crisis PR plan.  Avoiding PR pitfalls requires well-timed and thoughtful communications – you can’t just wing the response.

• You haven’t run a fire drill with that crisis PR plan.  So you ponied up and created a crisis PR plan.  It’s not collecting dust, is it?  The only way to make sure that pretty document will ever work is to stage a simulated PR crisis.  This allows you to fill gaps you won’t have time to do when reporters are hounding you.

• You’re ignoring consumer feedback.  Social media, for better or worse, has essentially removed transaction costs of blasting negative opinions about businesses.  Complaining about the hand you’ve been dealt will get you nowhere.  Monitor all relevant social media communications to triage which gripers matter and how to respond effectively.

• You haven’t devoted a budget to PR.  A recent column from magnate Mark Cuban railed against PR, arguing that for startups it’s a waste of money.  That principle may apply nicely to Cuban, whose considerable wealth and business interests give him superior leverage over media.  For the rest of us, we have to deal with traditional and social media reality, which means taking communications seriously as a vital business function.  Make sure you dedicate a certain percentage of operating costs to your media outreach needs.

• You’re in denial.  As stated at the start of this post, crisis PR hits every type of organization – political campaigns, Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, global alliances, and everything in between.  Given the ease and quickness with which negative comments can appear online, your business’s bottom-line is too valuable to risk thinking it won’t happen to you.

Next blog post: five signs your company will avoid a PR crisis!

Pinterest, the social media darling du jour, has deftly handled what could have been a slightly bigger PR headache.  The site recently received a request from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to remove a satirical Pinterest profile page about the former governor.

From there, a Pinterest representative contacted the account holder, and their back and forth discussion escalated (politely at least) with Pinterest asking the account holder to delete the profile.  Although the account holder seemed ready to dig in his heels, he instead took the more civil route and posted an “open apology” to Team Pinterest and also used the opportunity to scold the Romney campaign for its thin social media skin.

The result?  The Romney campaign, not Pinterest, took almost all the heat.  And, now FakeMittRomney rules his territory on Pinterest, with 425 followers and counting.

Well played, Pinterest!

A while back this blog gave free PR advice to social network startup Diaspora.  The recommendation was to use strong privacy controls to distinguish itself from (and become an attractive alternative to) Facebook.  Similarly, this blog advised MySpace (which still exists!) to do the same, during a particularly bad social media privacy-related episode at Facebook.

The fundamental PR tactic here is to take advantage of your competition’s weakness, and it never goes out of style.  Indeed, even though it’s on the verge of a $100 billion IPO, Facebook’s filing papers contain numerous points to exploit by crafty entrepreneurs.  Such opportunities are uncommon, so “attack now or forever hold your peace” should be engrained in every ambitious startup’s mindset.

Don’t believe so?  Then take a look at Microsoft, which got a ton of positive press this past week by taking on Google’s recent privacy flap.  While Google was still reeling from a poorly announced revision in product privacy policies, Microsoft was able to promote its own products and skewer Google in the process.  In a full-page ad in major global newspapers, Microsoft blared “Google is in the process of making some unpopular changes in some of their most popular products …. Those changes, cloaked in language like ‘transparency,’ ‘simplicity,’ and ‘consistency’ are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search, send, say or stream while using some of their services.”

Not the kind of PR jab any company wants to take, particularly when Congress is breathing down its back on the same issue.  And how do we know Microsoft’s tactic startled Google?  “Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ad campaign.”  Advantage: Microsoft.

This one will be short and (not so) sweet… you might have spent the past couple days reading about Google’s plans to unify privacy policies across all its products.  This will effectively tie in personal user data throughout all these platforms, causing serious cyber-heartburn on many tech blogs and sites because Google product users won’t be able to opt-out of such tracking.

Put aside the debate for a moment, and check out this snapshot of today’s most-read stories online at the Washington Post:

No amount of explaining the new system on Google’s official blog can counter this type of brief, but cringe-worthy, jolt.

For our friends in the PR industry… you know how December reliably yields “Top 10 PR Stories/Blunders/Hype of 20XX” features?  Let’s make a bold (haha) prediction: The first list item in 2012′s annual rounds-ups will be the greater online community’s stand against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  In the face of a sustained global lobbying campaign to beat the bill back, one Congressional Staffer described SOPA as a “dirty word beyond anything you can imagine.”

There’s little point in discussing the back and forth between SOPA opponents and proponents.  It’s safe to say the prime forces in favor of SOPA, such as the Motion Picture Association of America, have lost this fight.  As much as this blog discusses the power of words in PR, don’t forget the power of (website) images as well.  The MPAA’s site has a small subpage devoted to discussing “rogue websites” which is the keyword the content industry is pushing to dominate the debate.

In turn, Wikipedia simply shut itself down today with the following landing page:

So to review: The MPAA gets caught up on explaining process, and Wikipedia goes blank.  Pure PR KO for SOPA opponents.

The controversy may be local to Washington, DC, but its PR lessons are certainly universal.  The University of Maryland recently announced construction of a new school president’s house, and adjoining event facility, as a 14,000 square foot addition at the tune of $7.2 million.

The construction strikes a wee negative chord, as students and other school stakeholders have criticized the project.  They argue it’s too expensive, sends a bad signal in otherwise difficult economic times, and really stings since the University just cut eight athletic teams over budget concerns (and this from a school that really, really loves its sports).  It’s such a negative narrative that even newspapers across the pond have picked up on it.

In response, the University’s foundation wrote a letter to the Washington Post editorial board, arguing that the project will be funded completely by private donors and boost fundraising capabilities, thus allowing the property effectively to pay for itself and ultimately benefit the student body.

Ok, but… even if all that’s true, here’s the problem.  Knowing the construction might likely become a lightning rod of criticism, the University made many basic, glaring PR errors in the process:

1) No statement on the University’s website that communicates the value of the project.

2) No statement on the University’s Facebook page that communicates the value of the project.

3) No statement from University President Loh that communicates the value of the project.

Perhaps we’re missing a direct statement that (ahem) communicates the value of the project?  (If so, let us know.)

Add it up, and you get an awful image of the school administration’s priorities, not to mention a serious PR black eye.

We didn’t expect to do a second post on the theme from the last one, but customer fees continue to grab negative headlines.  That means in the age of 1% vs. 99 %, companies must be painfully clear about how fees might distort typical transactions.

For Uber, the new startup app that lets you score rides on otherwise-unbooked sedan car services, this lesson in fees is all too real.  Uber dispatches sedans in a way similar to taxi service, and for a slight premium over standard taxi fares, you get a chauffer-driven ride in style.  Uber’s innovation (particularly in our city where the taxi industry is notoriously hostile to riders) has earned it a great amount of popularity, and in that sense, an excellent reservoir of brand equity and positive PR.

That is… until some riders from this past New Year’s Eve got stuck with paying hundreds of dollars for rides of less than a few miles.  Uber employs what it calls “surge pricing” – a system that ratchets up fares when the app experiences high demand.

The economic explanation on surge pricing might be correct, but here’s the problem: in justifying the, ahem, uber-premium, Uber makes the classic PR mistake of defending process instead of defending outcome.  As every smart politician knows, any time you’re explaining a bill or political proposal, you’re losing.  Uber’s multiple attempts at explaining surge pricing unfortunately come across a bit tone-deaf; telling your customers that “70 years of [taxi fare] conditioning” is the culprit doesn’t resolve the pain from paying exorbitant to Uber.  And, judging by some of the extreme negative reactions and customer experiences, Uber has definitely taken a sharp reputation hit.

Uber’s CEO explains that surge pricing will remain in place, and warns users to expect higher fares during holidays and other high-volume events.  An ok warning, but taken to its logical extreme, that means surge pricing might be a frequent negative footnote to an otherwise awesome service.  If Uber continues having unusual billing incidents occur at a regular pace, we might witness slow-motion crisis PR by a thousand (negative customer experience) cuts.

Here is free PR advice for every global corporation that markets a service.

Never, under any circumstances, call any of your fees “convenient.”

Verizon, as you might know, committed a stunning PR blunder to round out 2011 by announcing a $2 fee on various methods of wireless service bill payment.  (Good luck trying to figure out the myriad maybe/maybe not categories of payment method.)  After an immediate, strong customer backlash, along with a note from the FCC hinting at an investigation, Verizon quickly backtracked and ditched the fee.

No doubt, Verizon customers had many reasons to revolt.  Part of the new fee scheme required customers to use auto-billing, a process Verizon abused to overcharge 15 million customers in 2010.  Secondly, Verizon continues grappling with massive network outages, which is spectacularly ill timing for a new price increase.  And thirdly… no company can brand their fees “convenient” in a tight economy!

But there’s a larger issue at play here.  Recall just a couple months ago when Bank of America dropped its planned $5 fee for debit card activity.  Target took a ton of heat for requiring employees to work on Thanksgiving for Black Friday sales.  Lowes Hardware tripped over its own senseless corporate-speak and stepped right into a hate group’s trap, alienating thousands of consumers.

What does this tell us?  In 2012 (and probably the next few years), brands must anticipate every possible element of public backlash when making crisis management plans.  That means thinking carefully about how the public will react to major change.  Now it’s not a matter of if, but when, and brand equity has much less leverage when citizens can quickly unite around a central protest message.

That’s Praecere’s first take on the world of PR in 2012.  And it comes without a convenience charge!  Happy new year and hope you continue to follow the Blog Aesthetic.

Rounding out 2011!  We’re honored to be mentioned in a few places online, check it out:

• PR Daily syndicated our recent blog post on what retailer Target had to do in the PR fallout from mandating employee time on Thanksgiving.

• Our friends at Lendio collaborated with us not once, but twice!  Santa must really like the Praecere shop.  Listen to their regular podcast series, where we discussed the latest news and trends for entrepreneurs of all stripes.  We also provided a guest post on the Lendio blog on quick PR tips for restaurants.

• Business2Community recently shared tips from 46 experts on the future of marketing in 2012, and our wisdom slots in at #19.

• People must have really loved our blog post on 5 types of PR agencies to avoid, as PR Daily re-re-syndicated it again a few weeks ago!

• Last but not least, we were invited by ExecDigital to pen an article on the PR and marketing genius of Steve Jobs.  The day the piece was slated to run was the same day Jobs passed away, but we made an editorial decision to keep the content unchanged, as the original version celebrated his insights in a fitting and tribute-minded way.  RIP to the greatest industrialist of this generation!

Cheers, and happy reading, Team Praecere