Grey skies thinking

With social media making all the world a stage for the playing out of PR blunders, how do you minimise your exposure to slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? (That’s enough Shakespeare -ed.)

Gerald Ratner’s “total crap”. New Coke. The heads of GM, Ford and Chrysler turning up in corporate jets to beg for a taxpayer bailout.

The UK bank with the disgruntled employee addressing letters to “Mr F*** Off”. The high street chain that sacked someone with cancer after they complained about work to 89 Facebook friends. Tom Cruise on Oprah. No one, big or small, is immune from stumbling – or being dragged – into a PR disaster and, once you’re in a hole, it can be a long and painful way back.

“You could literally make or break a business by the way you handle a crisis,” says Tangerine PR group managing director Sandy Lindsay. “That’s why it’s such an interesting time.”

Some businesses can go for years without incident, she adds, others have something “crackingoff” every couple of weeks. But while no two crises are the same, coming out unscathed – or at least achieving the best possible damage limitation – means being prepared for the worst “what ifs”.

“One thing I’ve always said about crisis management is it’s a bit of an oxymoron really because managing a crisis has to start way before you even have one,” Lindsay says.

Angela Smith, managing director of PR agency the Write Angle, notes, “Many businesses make the mistake of thinking they only need to deal with a crisis when it happens and if you leave yourself in that situation, it’s like anything in life, if you’re unprepared then knee-jerkreactions aren’t always the best reactions.”

To head off potential headaches, she recommends convening a crisis management team – although, ever the PR pro, Smith suggests calling it an “incident” management team – that brings together your communications people with representatives of each department to cover every angle.

“You never know what aspect of the business is going to beaffected by a crisis [‘incident’, Angela...], so if you’ve involved people across the organisation in the planning for a crisis then everybody is aware of what needs to be done,” she says.

Lindsay explains that alongside its training and coaching on handling the media, Tangerine PR conducts “audits” for clients to detect potential PR pitfalls.

“We talk to all the ‘heads of’ – all the various directors – and we say what could possibly go wrong in your world, in your bit of the business and if it did go wrong, what would it affect? What effect would it have on the business commercially, reputationally, and then we grade the risk factor based on each of those threats.

“If this were to happen, what would we do about it? Who would be a spokesperson? All that is done in some depth and from that you create a plan, a crisis plan.

“It doesn’t stop things happening but it means that if and when something does happen, you can react much more quickly.” “It’s having what you might describe as a ‘grey skies thinking’ session,” adds Smith.

A plan might include agreed holding statements that can tweaked to specific situations (a product recall, for example), as well as an order of battle laying out who is authorised to deal with the media – and who is not. You don’t want the receptionist or the poor bloke who sits in the cabin at the end of the car park giving interviews to door-stepping hacks eager for someone to fluff the party line.

Once you have a plan, don’t leave it to gather dust on the shelf.

Review it regularly to ensure you aren’t caught cold by a bolt from the blue. The whole point is to be ready to spring into action if and when a storm breaks.

But, says Lindsay, while the “golden hour” for reacting to a crisis has now become more like a “golden ten minutes”, reacting quickly does not mean reacting rashly.

“I always encourage clients to taken ten minutes, sit down and say, right, what are we trying to achieve here? Like any business situation, if you agree what your ideal outcome is you can all head towards it. If you’re all running around doing different things, it’s just a big mess, a big noise,” she explains.

The rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter has added another dimension to handling a PR crisis. It’s real-time, has a potentially global audience and, while it makes it easier to get your message out there, means disgruntled customers don’t have to picket your office with a handpainted sign anymore to register their displeasure.

Instead, they can sound off to potentially thousands of online followers – and, as that kid practising his light sabre skills found out 24 million-plus YouTube views later, you have no say or control over what goes viral.

So does this crank up the pressure to react within minutes, or even seconds, to potential problems? Well, yes and no.

Ben Aronson, strategic director at Juice Digital, says, “For customer relationship management, as well as overall complaints and customer service departments, social media has become, if not the current method, without a doubt the way of the future, for forward-thinking brands of handling it because it’s so realtime and interactive.”

However, he believes there is a bit of a misconception that because someone has posted something on Twitter or Facebook, you need to react “like, immediately”.

“I think people still need to take time and digest things,” he adds.

Smith recalls one potential client who reacted in haste and repented at leisure.

“They had a complaint on Facebook and then chose to actually have a full-scale debate in front of all their followers on Facebook, which I would absolutely recommend against,” she says.

“You should always respond to any complaints on Facebook. Then you should take them offl ine and not be having a full-scale debate in front of an audience that’s watching that unfold, because often things can be misconstrued, so don’t just assume that because you’ve started a conversation on that channel that that’s the only channel you can use.”

“What people tend to forget with it is the same principles apply to social media as any other kind of marketing or advertising; it’s just that it happens way quicker and your audience is potentially much
bigger and you’re dealing with people who can have very, very strong opinions about something,” says Steve Kuncewicz, a digital media lawyer at law firm Gateley.

“I think people sometimes go into social media and underestimate the response they’re going to get.”

An incident involving the supermarket Waitrose recently showed how things can snowball.

Someone claiming to be a customer used the company’s Facebook page, normally reserved for news on Heston and Delia’s latest concoctions, to allege that another customer had verbally abused their disabled child.

Kuncewicz says other Facebook users quickly became “irate” at the apparent lack of response from the supermarket – especially when other users were having queries about shopping answered.

However, Waitrose did respond to the original complaint and investigated it. This meant that when the press came calling (which they did), the supermarket could say it had acknowledged the issue. It also meant on that afternoon, when people who had not seen that acknowledgement piled in with their indignation, other users actually stood up for the company and defended it.

“One of the best things around social is that you can build a community of people quickly – and if you’ve got an engaged community, you can get a message out quite quickly so you can easily go to your 10,000 fans and say, please be aware and spread the word, please RT and say this is not the truth,” says Kuncewicz.

“Part of the skill is knowing what to get out and when and having a crisis plan so you can reach to something very quickly.

You’ve got to know what you’re going to say.”

However, Adi Gaskell, online marketing manager for the Process Excellence Network and a writer on social media, thinks too many companies don’t give themselves this protection because they don’t have a social media policy.

“By far the predominant approach to social media at the moment is ‘build it and pray’,” he says.

“A lot of people feel they’ve got to have a Twitter profi le or a Facebook page but they don’t really give thought to what it’s going to be used for and there’s no strategy in mind.

“If you don’t have a strategy in place then it’s leaving an awful lot to chance at a time when you don’t really want things left to chance.”

He has identifi ed fi ve stages that businesses go through in their relationship with social media. The first is fear – worrying about people saying the wrong thing on Twitter or criticising the company. Next is folly, where they struggle to see the benefits and regard it as distraction or waste of time. In the third stage, they see a “utility” to social media but don’t do use it properly – the “built it and pray” approach.

“It’s only the last two stages where they’re really taking a strategy to it and taking a coordinated approach,” he explains.

“In the final stage they completely integrate social media into everything that they do and it becomes a focal point. I think still the majority of companies are struggling to get past stage three, with a lot stuck in stages one and two.”

Kuncewicz points out that with the Advertising Standards Agency code now applying to marketing communications on websites and with more and more companies allowing everyone from the CEO to the sales force to take to Twitter, the scope for dropping a PR clanger is greater and therefore having a social media policy governing what can and cannot be said on the company’s behalf is “an absolute must”.

“A lot of it is about trust – you wouldn’t let everybody run riot with the brand name,” he adds.

“You’ve got to know who you would be happy to represent you in the media – and this is in the media. You can have something go viral in the wrong way very, very quickly.”

Ultimately, online or offline, handling a crisis is about protecting your reputation. A PR gaffe might have a short-term impact on cash fl ow but you can recover from that. If something blows up to the point of damaging public trust in your brand, you might not. Forget the old saying. There is defi nitely such a thing as bad publicity.

“The only thing that’s more important than making sure that nobody has been harmed, physically harmed, is starting to talk to the media,” says Lindsay.

“My rationale is that you can insure your company against fire and fl ood; you can even nowadays insure your company against key persons within the business dying... you cannot
insure your company against a loss of reputation – and once the reputation is gone, it’s gone.”

“SOME VERY DARK THOUGHTS...”
What’s it like to find yourself at the centre of a national, or even international, PR crisis? Headhunter Gary Chaplin hit the headlines last year when he sent a none-too-complimentary reply to a mass email from a jobseeker.

The line immortalised by the Sun – and followed up by the Daily Mail and newspapers as far away as Australia – was “if you are not bright enough to learn how to ‘bcc’ ... then please f*** off, you are too stupid to get a job, even in banking”.

Chaplin tells EN that he had been “forced to resign, rightly or wrongly” over the message before the media storm blew up. Four weeks later, his brother, who had picked up the story from friends in Sydney of all places, got in touch to find out what was happening. “My wife took the call and I just heard her say ‘What? The Sun?’ so I Googled the Sun and in the course of five minutes, my world collapsed,” he recalls.

He holds his hands up to a moment of madness, but adds “ten per cent of it was my mistake, sending a sarcastic retort back to somebody, but 90 per cent was the gross exaggeration that happened from who knows, maybe the Sun, maybe somebody else”.

These exaggerations, according to Chaplin, concerned the number of people the email went to (the reports said 4,000, he says 49 “and I think all but 21 of those bounced back”), the swearing (“It didn’t have anything like the level of bad language in it”) and, most disappointingly, that he earned £200,000 a year.

It “knocked the stuffi ng” out him and in the fi rst 36 hours after the story broke, he admits to “some very dark thoughts”.

“I just hid – you assume that everybody walking down the street has seen the story. In Marks & Spencer buying some food, you assume that the girl behind the checkout is thinking, ‘that’s him from the Sun’,” he says.

Chaplin adds that his daughter snapped him out of the downward spiral.

“You look at this tiny little person that’s yours and the dark thoughts go to the back. You’ve got to put food on the family table and you’ve got to look after her,” he says. When Chaplin dared to turn on his mobile and computer again, he found hundreds of messages, some from contacts; others from total strangers. Only one, he says, was negative and none were “vitriolic”.

“It was almost 1,000 messages altogether and by the end of it all, there were almost 38 job offers,” he adds.

“My world just started to rebuild a little bit and it was probably the fi rst time my wife spoke to me for about 48 hours – you can imagine she wasn’t best pleased.”

One of these messages led to a new start, a joint venture with London-based executive search specialist Communicate which will see him running a high-end headhunting operation in the North. No such thing as bad publicity, then? Well, although he’s come out the other side, Chaplin does not recommend a crisis as the best path to opportunity.

“Without question there is bad publicity. If I hadn’t had the positive mindset that I’ve got to
turn it around, it could have been very different.

“Had I been of a nervous disposition or had I been going through other issues, the way that it knocked me, if I was starting from a lower ebb, then I hate to think what could have happened.

“It’s an experience that I’ve absolutely no desire to go through again.”

MR FIX-IT
Max Clifford has been PR guru to the stars for some 40 years. His reputation is such that, he tells EN, he has “never, ever” had to pitch for business. If someone wants something kept from the public gaze, they come to him.

“I’m not saying for one second that I can guarantee to keep anything out [of the public arena] – I’m not saying that at all and that isn’t the case – but naturally you do the best you can on behalf of the people you represent,” he says.

“The first and most important rule is anticipate,” he adds.

“The most important part of damage limitation is anticipation and a very close, confidential working relationship with your clients.

“The closer you are to your client, whether it’s a star, whether it’s a company, whether it’s an organisation, the more chance you’ve got of finding out potential problems before they become public.

“Unless you know more than anyone else, you know, you’re at a disadvantage. I always say to people if I don’t know more than anybody else apart from yourself, then you’re wasting my time and your money.”

The total honesty he demands from clients will be reciprocated, perhaps brutally so. “It’s not saying what they want to hear, it’s telling them as it is,” he explains. “We say, look we do it our way and if you don’t accept that, then go somewhere else.”

Clifford’s other rules are to forget denying everything (ie lie) as “that doesn’t achieve anything” and asany journalist worth their salt will keep chasing, to never say “no comment” – “it’s a red rag to a bull” – but otherwise, every case has its own demands.

“It’s like a game of football. You never get two games the same and sometimes you’re winning 2-0 and you’re all over them and the next minute you’re on the defensive and you’ve got to adjust to what’s going on very, very quickly,” he says.

And what does the PR king make of the old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity? Does it exist?

“Oh God, yes. Bad publicity destroys businesses, destroys individuals, destroys reputations,” he says. “Gerald Ratner – look at him.”

Ratner came to Clifford four years after the infamous “total crap” remarks when he was looking to launch his online jewellery business. Max’s advice?

“You’ve got to put your hands up, say it was all your fault, what a fool you made of yourself – journalists will like that. They won’t like ‘you said it in confi dence and they’ve twisted what he said and they’re liars’, which is what he tried to do with no success.

“Within a year or two [he] was making more money than he’d ever made in his life. So that’s a practical example of what we did.

“[We] took a disaster and turned it into a triumph – and what was that? Common sense, really.”

Picture: Cheer up, it might never... Oh. It did. Adi Gaskell says a coherent social media strategy is vital when a crisis hits.