I think enough time — gosh, like a whole week — has gone by so we can be sufficiently clear-headed to draw wildly self-serving and far-reaching conclusions from the latest Twitter-enabled, blog-powered, marketing and PR dustup/corporate nightmare scenario. In fact, we’ve got two of them, so we can do an episode of compare and contrast: AmazonFail and the Domino’s Pizza “prank” video.
We don’t need to rehash the details of each event (though I note it’s interesting to visualize the evolution of each story using Google News Timeline — though for the life of me, I can’t see how to permalink and share a query).
In each case, something bad happened, it went viral (with blogs and Twitter as accelerants), and there was a whole bunch of angst, sturm, drang, and swirl as each affected company was slow to respond.
* The Acceleration of the Outrage Cycle: These two latest events kind of make me look nostalgically back at the good old days of 2004, where it took days, or even weeks, for something to really blow up online (see the Kryptonite Lock controversy, which brewed up on bicycle Web forums.)
The Amazon case was apparently set off by the LiveJournal blog entry of an affected author. Between the nature of fandom and LiveJournal’s pretty good tools for disseminate blog entries among your network of friends and followers, it propagated outward at a, shall we say, rapid pace.
The Domino’s scandal was posted to YouTube. ‘Nuff said.
Lesson: You’ve got to stay on top of things and monitor at all times. And, once you pass a certain threshhold, “all times” means “all times”: 24/7/365. So make sure you have an escalation plan for all those inconvenient nights/holidays/weekends/vacations.
* Just How Rapid Is Your Rapid Response? Amazon’s response was hobbled by the fact that things blew up on Easter Sunday, which limited their initial response to a lame, canned-sounding message from customer service. In the absence of a better response, this led the way for various attention-seekers to take (false) credit, and also allowed Amazon’s critics to attribute to malice what was later explained by stupidity (and blaming the French).
Originally, I’d thought that Domino’s had responded faster, but this Directorship article in BusinessWeek states that the leadership sat on the issue for 24 hours, not wanting to make things worse. As if.
Lesson: Trust Jack Bauer when he says, “THERE’S NO TIME!” Have contingency plans in place. No plan can cover everything, but if you have a framework and infrastructure in place, you can modify and adapt to specific situations, instead of trying to start from scratch.
Incidentally, this is also why communication and conversation is important when there isn’t a crisis — it builds credibility and networks that you can leverage when you need them.
* Respond in the Right Venue: The AmazonFail furor calmed down not when the official “ham-fisted cataloging error” statement came top-down from Amazon PR, but buttom-up, when Amazon alumni and unauthorized insiders gave enough credible detail, in the blogs, to settle people down. Bloggers were the folks with their hair on fire, so that’s where the most effective response was.
The Domino’s case is a little different, but because it blew up on YouTube, the best place to respond was on YouTube. (Sure, also maintain the forms and issue the release and update the corporate Web site if you want. It’s expected. But recognize that’s not where the influence, audience, and solution lies.)
Lesson: You got to go to the hotspots to put out the fire.
Finally, to beat on drum some more: People don’t believe corporate PR. But they do believe other people. One of two things will happen: PR folks will try to co-opt the process and come up with officially-sanctioned leaks, or they can try doing things above-board and make sure the front-line folks who actually know what’s going on get heard from.
Any other far-reaching and self-serving advice you’d like to share? Leave a comment.
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