Caribou Coffee’s announcement last week, that the company was shuttering stores and laying off employees, proves that relying exclusively on a press release to deliver unpleasant news is a bad strategy in the digital age.
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Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight
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Social marketing, PR insight & thought leadership - from The PR Coach
Curated by
Jeff Domansky
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While social media can build your business brand, it can also tear you down. View this list of 10 potentially damaging social media problems. Small business social media is a good thing…usually. Of course, this week observers in business and technology fields got a good look at how social media can also go bad. Challenges in small business social media are inevitable. Social media tools can build your brand. But, they can also tear you down. There are many uncertainties too. Below are 10 troubles with small business social media and how to set them right..--
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Reputation challenges: recent "dongle incident" demonstrates that we are living in a world with no room for error. Where will it lead?
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Poland Spring, American Airlines, Taco Bell and NASCAR all make our list. The year is less than three months old, yet already several brands have made king-sized screwups in social media.
Among their crimes: Using a four-letter word to insult a nine-year-old girl. Live-tweeting a mass layoff. And angering Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. Poland Spring, American Airlines, Taco Bell and NASCAR are among the brands who should have known better. All of the following social media fails triggered hundreds or thousands of responses, and made headlines in the regular media as a result....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
No excuses for these PR fails...
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Tesco salad allegedly contained dead bird; company unresponsive so far
This is one of those shocking stories about food product problems that tabloid TV and newspapers love. Before UK retailer Tesco could respond effectively, the story’s going viral.
Forget the UK horsemeat scandal. The Metro News headline said it all: “Dead bird five inches long found in Tesco ‘ready to eat’ salad.”
Within minutes, the story was picked up on numerous UK media websites, competing newspapers and social media....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Tesco's non-response in the first 12 hours is baffling. This crisis is just getting started. Stay tuned!
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Whatever services you provide, whether it be pizzas or hosting services, you should learn how to communicate with your audience, build up a positive image and react to negative reviews and comments of unsatisfied customers (or probably evil competitors!). This post focuses on some recent online reputation management tactics that can be useful for any website....
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Case Study: Good Corporate Communications in a ‘Difficult Situation’ Earlier this month at PyCon 2013 — a big tech industry conference for developers — a female attendee tweeted a picture of two male attendees, publicly shaming them for making inappropriate sexist jokes. This tweet led to at least two people losing their jobs. One of them was the woman herself, who worked for SendGrid as a “developer evangelist”, and the incident has sparked heated debate about sexism in tech and attacks on all sides. But stepping away from the commentary regarding her intentions or actions, we can learn some valuable PR lessons from the actions of a company facing fire due to the actions of an individual employee. As the title of the CEO’s public statement implies, SendGrid did an excellent job of handling a “difficult situation” by taking a stance and communicating it quickly to stakeholders. SendGrid correctly decided that the incident required a corporate response....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
This story is everywher but is a great case study and cautionary tale for employers, HR, reputation managers.
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We say sorry tens of times a day. ‘Sorry’ for bumping into someone in the street when it’s not our fault, ‘sorry, I didn’t quite catch that’ when you simply can’t hear; and of course we apologise for a perfectly legitimate complaint, ‘I’m sorry, but my soup is cold’. Perhaps our unique British politeness is to blame, but is the word sorry uttered so many times a day that it’s beginning to lose all meaning? I’d go as far to say that we don’t’ even realise when we’re saying sorry, or when we’re being apologised to.
So for businesses caught in the midst of a PR disaster, how can they make their customers hear their apologies? Firstly, as Stephanie recently blogged, timing is everything; it took Apple two long weeks to apologise for the Apple Maps debacle and they’re still mopping up the bad PR around that one.
We’ve seen many corporate apologies in the past few weeks, particularly in the wake of the horse-meat scandal, and some in particular have stuck out. Tesco, though not the only guilty party by any stretch, has been a serial apologist throughout horsemeat-gate. It has taken out full-page ads in every national newspaper, more than once, to say sorry to customers. There is something striking in this age of digital, rapid, instant, direct-to-the-consumer communication, that the full-page print newspaper apology is still so popular with big businesses; and looking more closely at what Tesco said is very interesting. An article on the BBC last week about the style of Tesco’s newspaper ads, suggested that they have more in common with poems than standard corporate apologies....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Inside look at crisis management, apologies and, yuck, horse meat.
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As the horsemeat saga rumbles on, it is becoming clearer and clearer which organisations invested in crisis management training beforehand…and which didn’t. This manifests itself most obviously in the performance of company spokesperson in their television and radio interviews. I was asked by The Grocer to assess the crisis communication efforts of the big supermarkets and as part of this I analysed the approach of their crisis spokespeople....
Jeff Domansky's insight:
Secret to crisis communication? Consumers want to know: Are we safe? Do you know what you're doing? Can we trust you?
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From hurricanes and tornadoes to wildfires, co-ops are harnessing the power of social media to reach out to members during times of crisis.
“Ignore using social media for crisis communications at your own peril,” cautioned Chris Powell, director of public relations at Albemarle Electric Membership Corp.
“Members not only expect real-time information, they expect to be able to respond back to it,” said Powell, adding that members always have the option of creating their own sites offering positive or negative feedback. “Within five years I expect social media to be the dominant force in crisis communications.”...
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Not only that, mixing marketing with layoffs is just bad social media and marketing practice. Lots bad PR lessons in this tempest in a coffee pot...