My talk at last week's PRNewsOnline "How To" conference at the National Press Club went really well, unless you were the waiter that had to clean up the glass I broke on stage when I knocked it off the podium with my elbow. The speaker response sheets gave me some of the highest marks of anyone that day, so it had to be entertaining to somebody.
The instruction I was given was to teach people in 20 minutes how to communicate online in a crisis. I covered some of that, but more than that, I showed the many ways you could turn small disputes into full blown crises. I assumed that my audience figured out that these were mistakes of others you should learn from, not instructions on how to do it yourself.
The most important thing to learn about communications during a crisis online (or off, for that matter) is something I learned from Ben Popken from Consumerist.com. He said, during the Mad Magazine-Circuit City kerfuffle that the right response is usually:
Admit you did a bad thing;
Stop doing the bad thing; and
Make a material gesture of apology.
Doing all three is harder than it looks, which is why I find crisis communications so often about changing a company's business practices, rather than about simply explaining those business practices more carefully.
Embedded below are the slides from the talk. Enjoy!
Online PR pros always consider the "Streisand Effect" when considering using one of the legal tools available to suppress an online critic. The Streisand Effect happens when the act of suppression draws more attention to the item you're trying to suppress than if you'd just left it alone. It's the online equivalent of why you don't go on the NBC Nightly News to refute a critical local news story that hasn't received any pickup.
The Yes Men dated their press release October 19th and held their event at the National Press Club that morning in Washington DC. The video was immediately picked up by the Huffington Post, whose coverage that day drove 24,156 views of the main video on YouTube. Even more people saw it that night on the Rachel Maddow show that evening.
The next day, October 20th, Rush Limbaugh picked up the story on his show and embedded the video on his website, driving another 23,000 views. Limbaugh's angle was about the gullibility of news media and an attack on the New York Times, though there's no evidence to suggest the New York Times was in the room.
This graph of the main video of the fake press conference however shows the YouTube views leveling off after the takedown was sent. The prank has peaked, and because of the real Chamber's fast action sending a takedown, they did it at a time when frankly no more damage could be done. It was already as bad as it could get.
Notice how new YouTube views start leveling off by October 21st. This meme is over. I have requested access to the traffic data for the prank US Chamber website from various Yes Men contacts, but have heard nothing yet. If I get access, I'll look to see if the takedown coverage spurred additional traffic to the prank website, validating some impact of the Streisand Effect.
What happens now?
Well I'm no great Internet sleuth, but it appears the Yes Men or their fellow pranksters have moved the parody website to a new ISP, Hosting.com. If the real US Chamber insists on following the Yes Men around the Internet sending DMCA notices to every new $10 / month hosting company they find, they could actually create news about how the no-budget pranksters are thwarting the real US Chamber and their lawyers.
Furthermore, any attempt to actually drag them into court is likely to draw out big First Amendment defenders. It would be the height of foolishness to press this hard. The real US Chamber is probably better off using the domain name dispute resolution process to take away chamber-of-commerce.us. (Though I just checked, and to date a dispute hasn't been filed.)
While this will create some negative press, it will probably happen so far in the future that this issue (and the cap and trade legislation) will be long out of the public mind and generate little new press. It's also a much more direct solution than chasing the Yes Men off every ISP in the world, which is a legal game of Whack-A-Mole the Yes Men are bound to win. Until then they should just ignore it, the parody isn't getting a great deal of new attention anymore.
I just tried an interesting experiment and the results were not what I expected.
My professional writing has two very distinct audiences: public relations professionals interested in how PR works differently online, and nonprofit people interested in measurable marketing. I've learned over time that these audiences really can't be meshed (or perhaps I'm not a talented enough writer to mesh them). After talking to a number of you, I have begun writing seperate articles targeted towards each.
About 4 hours ago I sent out my weekly email with two different articles, one about Google Wave for PR people and one about measuring the effectiveness of third party donation forms for nonprofits. I split my list and A/B tested my subject lines:
Google Wave; Measure 3rd party donation forms
and one with audience tags:
PR: Google Wave; NONPROFITS: Measure 3rd party donation forms
which one do you think got a better open rate? To find out, I've obscured the answer in white text below. Select the following paragraph with your mouse to see:
Start of highlighted text
The audience-tagged subject line got 13 unique opens out of 77 recipients, or 16.88% open rate. The plain subject line received 18 unique opens out of 80 recipients, or a 22.5% open rate, a third more. More opens could come in over time, but that's a pretty interesting number.
On September 16, 2009, the Humane Society of America released a hidden camera video of cruel conditions inside an egg-supplier to the IHOP chain, and urged viewers to send letters to the CEO of IHOP to implement cage-free egg supplier policies. We wanted to measure the impact this campaign had online. Did it catch fire? Did it create a groundswell of support? Did it create activity and excitement in others?
Launching the campaign
The Humane Society's campaign was launched on September 16th with a video taken by a smaller nonprofit, Compassion Over Killing. The launch elements included:
posting the video on YouTube;
posting a campaign call to action to their website (a letter to IHOP CEO Julie Stewart asking IHOP to start using cage free eggs);
posting links on both their Twitter and Facebook presences;
posting a note on their President's blog;
emailing their membership; and
finding and posting comments on individual blog postings that mention IHOP, even if they were unrelated to the egg controversy (such as ones that mention excitement about a new IHOP opening).
Response from IHOP
On September 16 the Humane Society said that IHOP responded to them with a new section of its website, "Social Responsibility" that contains a new section entitled "Cruelty-Free Food" with the claim "It’s important to state clearly that we are against the cruel treatment of animals used in the production of food for our restaurants."
Josh Balk at the Humane Society insisted that this page was created after they launched their cage-free campaign, but was not able to produce evidence of that. Jennifer Morrisson of IHOP said that she could not put a firm date on when this page was created. If accurate, this would be the only outward response IHOP executed in reaction to the Humane Society's claims.
Results
Internally, Humane Society staff probably grade this effort by three measures:
Can they force IHOP to change its egg-supplier's practices?
How effective is it at attracting new members and donations?
How much attention does it garner online?
Without access to HSUS' data, we can only answer #1 and #3.
Impact On IHOP's Business Practices
Apart from this one statement, IHOP has made no announcements about its egg supplier's practices. Josh Balk at the Humane Society said HSUS was in discussions with IHOP before they launched their campaign, so presumably they will be in discussions again.
However, addressing the Humane Society directly and publicly would direct more attention to a conflict that IHOP would probably prefer stay not newsworthy. This strategy appears to be working to date, and has avoided fueling the Humane Society's campaign. In fact there is remarkably little press coverage given the graphic nature of the video. Apparently secretly-filmed footage no longer carries the publicity impact it used to.
Attention Garnered Online
Online, the reaction was stronger, but still not as large as anyone probably expected. There are a number of ways to measure impact and popularity of such a campaign online. Popular campaigns will be shared, echoed, and forwarded through social media. Here are a few ways in which campaigns that build excitement create measurable data trails that we measured.
YouTube views
A hidden camera video of poor living conditions for chickens ought to be the most popular asset of the campaign. A five minute version was posted on September 16th
A shorter two and a half minute piece was posted on September 21
Both videos together only have less than 11,000 views and never broke into popular viral territory. As you can see from these graphs, both stopped getting significant views within ten days of their posting.
Digg votes
Digg.com is a well-known conduit for popular word-of-mouth topics. Hot topics such as Kanye's interruption at a music awards show easily garners thousands of digg votes as users pass around the links or videos in question, and then create additional follow-on pages. As you can see from this graph, the campaign was submitted the week after launch, and then only received one digg vote. This is a poor result.
Google search pollution
Invading a brand's top ten google results for their Google vanity search (a search on their name) is another way to measure if your campaign has broken into the public consciousness. A search on the phrase "IHOP" shows the Humane Society campaign linked at #12 for the Google Search Results. This is pretty good. With an SEO campaign, they are likely to be able to break into the top 10, which should get the attention of IHOP's management.
Breaking into the top 10 of a brand that cares is a surefire way to resolve an issue. There are legions of stories of people that had an unsatisfying experience with a company, blogged about it, broke into the top 10, and then had their issues resolved quickly. This strategy should work for the Humane Society. As an aside, note how IHOP's search traffic works:
See those spikes? Those are Saturdays and Sundays, every single one of them, and the trend goes back this way for months, possibly forever. People search for IHOP in extremely predictable ways.
Wikipedia entry pollution
Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative sites online. If you have a Wikipedia page, it will show up in the top 10 search results for your name, and be difficult to dislodge. Beginning on October 1, an 11 day Wikipedia edit war began over a new section labeled "Controversies", with various editors and contributors arguing over the adequate sourcing of the claims on the page. Early versions of the page read like bragging from animal-rights advocates, citing entirely unsubstantiated claims that "Tens of thousands of consumers called and emailed IHOP to urge the company to switch some of its eggs to cage-free" without any independent source to verify it.
The largest IHOP Facebook fan page has 47,000 fans and a wall for users to post comments. It has a strong showing of complaints of people asking IHOP to use cage-free eggs. During the Wikipedia edit war there were accusations that IHOP was deleting complaints from their wall, but this was deleted because the claim could not be verified. The default page users are directed to when they come to the IHOP fan page is not the wall, however, it's an NFL promotion, and viewers of the Wall only see IHOP announcements unless they click 'Just Fans', in which case they see this:
In addition a new IHOP fan page is slowly growing, with just under 5,000 fans. This page appears to be populated by people who don't think much of the animal cruelty accusations and love IHOP's food.
Online petition
The Humane Society announced their web-based petition to IHOP reached 10,000 members on October 8th, about three weeks from the start of the campaign. A smaller Twitter-based petition has 138 signatories as of today, and is unlikely to grow significantly more. While that number isn't likely to cause IHOP's management or franchisees to rush back to the negotiating table, it's probably enough to get their attention.
Google Search Insights
Another great way to judge whether a PR effort has influenced the nation's zeitgeist is whether it drives people online to search for the topic using Google. I examined Google searches for "cage free eggs" and found two interesting things: 1. The searches are all primarily from California. 2. There is no discernible spike in search relevance during the time of the campaign. There's a small increase at best and its effect has already dissipated.
There are no sizable numbers of people searching for the topics of "ihop animal cruelty".
How should you grade the campaign and the PR responses within?
For the Humane Society, the campaign seems to be popular with their members, but it has not achieved the breakout status that would allow it to grow legs and storm the Internet, angering and recruiting tens of thousands of new donors to the Humane Society's cause. And still, HSUS may be happy that the added pressure the campaign has created may bring IHOP back to the negotiating table to discuss enacting a voluntary cage-free egg policy.
IHOP's PR team has done an excellent job of not feeding the publicity around the Humane Society's campaign. Their silence indicates they don't feel comfortable defending this policy and have no ability to commit to change it anytime soon. If they did, they could announce a change with a timetable, but no such action has come to date.
They've neither tried to take the videos down, which would create a Streisand Effect of added attention, nor have they acknowledged the campaign publicly, which would be all that's necessary for the he-said she-said writing tendencies of journalists to let their stories write themselves as the conflict created its own coverage.
To use a poker analogy, given the cards IHOP was dealt, they played their hand to the best possible outcome.
[This article first ran in PRNewsOnline.com. Go check them out! -Shabbir]
In the last few articles I’ve described the importance of measurement to your website, and how to examine whether your social media efforts are working or not. Now it’s time to look at the big picture. Are your efforts in each medium actually working, and how should you budget in the coming year?
If you haven’t discovered yet, when you start using twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and press releases written with search engine optimization in mind, you’ve become a marketer who uses PR as your medium. Congratulations! PR is a very valid way of approaching marketing, and if it hasn’t already happened in your company, PR and marketing staff overlap. (In smaller organizations, they can be the same person or even the same department!)
In this article we’ll examine some data from each medium, and give you a method for examining whether your efforts there are actually working and planning for next year.
First, gather your data For a defined set of time, you’ll need to gather data from your webs statistics that show you the conversion rate and total numbers of goals you’ve accomplished. This is pretty straightforward in a program like google analytics. You can do this with a month’s worth of data, but six month’s worth is better. Make sure you’ve tagged the “thank you” or “receipt” pages of your lead generation forms or e-mail subscribe forms.
Next, compute your return on investment Once you’ve got the data, create a custom report that measures each goal’s conversion rate, and total number of completions. Have it break out these results by the dimension “medium” and voila, you’ve got your website results broken down by medium.
I used this technique to pull the results for a lead generation effort from a client engagement. Here’s what I got:
I measured one of the three ‘asks’ on the website and then the different activities that fed it. The partners category are simply referral web links from specific partners that support the organization. It’s a quarter of the goal total, a small effort, and has a very high conversion rate and return on investment.
Generally when you look at what’s working with your website, you want to approach it with an open mind. Only then will you see the unintended successes, and only then will you discover new techniques. Ask someone who manages AdWords advertising and they’ll tell you that sometimes the keywords you throw in as an afterthought end up performing surprisingly well. If you’re only examining the efforts you have made predictions on, you won’t discover these gems.
Then, figure out where to optimize and where to reduce For this data, the first question you should ask yourself is “Are there more partners we could be asking for links here?” Sometimes you max out a particular channel. You buy all the inventory on a perfectly targeted website, for example. If this isn’t the case, this is where you should start funding your efforts. Find more partners to link to you. If their link pages are generating only a little bit of traffic, ask them to feature you for a short time.
In this data, the second best performing marketing technique in this example is your organic search work. It contributes to over half of your total goal accomplishments, and has a good return on investment. If you haven’t already, you may want to start a more formal SEO program to garner more leads from this channel. It may be a good time to look at some new terms to develop to diversify your traffic.
In this case, your e-mail list is definitely producing leads, but while it’s conversion rate is good, it’s not producing a volume of leads that justifies the time invested. Unless you can easily raise your conversion rates of your e-mail list, I would suggest looking at ways of bulking up your e-mail list. It’s the equivalent of pouring more into the top of the funnel.
Your cost-per-click campaigns (search marketing like Google AdWords) are about a fifth of your workload, and a fifth of your results. This is great, but it would be nice if it was more productive. If you’re managing it entirely internally, you may want to get a marketing audit from an agency.
If you’re already using an agency, you may want to rebid the work.
The social media data is quite real. This particular client just isn’t seeing the results from Facebook and twitter. I would recommend cutting back the weekly effort to just 10% or 15% at the most. That doesn’t mean you can’t re-energize it later on, but someone has to demonstrate some results before you would put in your precious resources.
Conclusion People always complain about the budgeting process cutting things they need, but wouldn’t it be awesome, for once, to have a real concrete basis for your budget requests? What’s more, wouldn’t it be great to directly tie your budget and efforts to the company’s bottom line?
You can do this with a little preparation and a little discipline, but you have to be prepared to live with the consequences of what the numbers tell you. The data will set you free.
Shabbir Imber Safdar spends his days at Virilion Inc, an eleven year old full service interactive agency. He still can’t decide if he should have “marketer”, “online pr guy”, or “digital public affairs” in his title. He blogs about all of these at TruthyPR.com
By Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn, Virilion Inc
Last month, we talked about how important it is during the downturn to adopt a culture of measurement. When your PR efforts create a measurable impact on your organization’s goals, you will be at the head of the line for budget and staff. If you can’t measure your benefits to the organization’s goals, then your PR efforts are merely, “those communications people we have to keep around”.
There are a number of “social media experts” who would tell you that you should measure your social media efforts by the numbers of friends you garner, or by the number of times people “interact with your brand on social media sites”. These are fake metrics that won’t save your job or your budget. If you don’t believe us, go into the office of the CEO/President/Executive Director and say, “If our sales/donations/leads went down to zero next quarter, but we got a 100,000 Facebook friends, would you worry about your job?”
In this article we’ll teach you how to set up and examine your online PR activities for effectiveness and how to use that information to request more resources in the next budget cycle for efforts that are lagging.
I recently completed a long redesign project for environmental fundraising federation, EarthShare.
The project was challenging but as usually happens, if you're working
with good people everything goes well, and the staff at EarthShare are
definately good people.
Through a long process, we wireframed
out the website, handed it off to a design firm, then cut up and built
out the website and pilot wrote content for EarthShare for six months.
Having established the editorial vehicles, we're now transitioning the
writing duties to EarthShare internal staff who will be taking on the
content vehicles we created.
Often after a redesign it can be
hard to measure success, but in this case it was no problem. I had
kept analytics from before we did the site re-launch, and there are
some key improvements.
These
two graphs measure the time spent on the site by visitors from search
engines, as well as number of pages consumed. You can see that
immediately upon the redesign we increased both of these. Also the
ability to drive people to donation pages (as well as donations) were
higher.
Visitors from every source were driven to the donation form more often and completed it after the redesign.
The
success of this was driven by a new layout and new editorial vehicles.
I can help your website in this same way. Call me to learn more.
Pew Research Center recently released additional data about Americans online.
I'd like to say it's momentous, but it's simply the continuation of a
trajectory. More people of every age are going online, and the usage
curve of the young is pushing higher as the population ages.
Years
ago, when having seniors online was momentous, this kind of data was
useful to me when trying to convince existing/prospective clients to
invest in their online operations. Nowadays if I hear 'My audience
isn't online' in the face of data like this, then I'm confronting the
kind of belief that evidence isn't going to change. (It's like a form
of 'no')
The one data point I'm going to suggest you pay
attention to is the social networking usage. Depending on who you ask,
Facebook is either currently tied or beating MySpace in terms of
worldwide usage. For Americans, the cutoff for social network usage
appears to be 40. Under 40, 1 in 3 Americans or more is using a social
network. Over 40, it's 1 in 5. That barrier will slowly move up the
bracket until eventually retirees are using Facebook because their kids
invited them to view photos of grandkids.
If you don't have a strategy for your Facebook presence in 2009, you are behind. Call me if that bothers you: 202-256-1704.
A tip of the hat to David Haase, Virilion's Editorial and Content Director for pointing me at the Pew Study.
[This article originally appeared in PRNews' print newsletter.]
By Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn, Virilion Inc.
“Google never forgets…” -Online magazine Slashdot “…and that includes all your PR mistakes.” -Your humble authors
Half the people using the Internet today will use a search engine to look something up. So the question of what Google means for your reputation is an important one.
(By the way, this isn’t another article about search engine optimization, so keep reading.)
If someone criticizes you on a blog in Digital Nowheresville, many PR professionals don’t care until it starts climbing up into the first 3 or 4 pages of Google search results.
Many incidents are known only within niche communities but that won’t stop word of the incident from hitting Google, the biggest community out there.
What you want to do is be able to measure how these incidents, once resolved, are affecting your product and your core brand. In this article we look at two online PR crises from the last year and show you how the short-term response affected (or didn’t) the perception of the product line and the core brand in the long term.
Although you may not have heard of these crises, they were serious for each of the brands involved.
Dell Vostro Keyboard Mistake
In early 2008, Dell shipped a small number of laptop models with the lower row of letters (ZXCVBNM) shifted one letter to the right. As a result, most people typing on the keyboard consistently misspelled any word involving those letters. Two separate recalls were issued, the second one occurring when a keyboard supplier re-shipped the now rejected keyboards for assembly a second time.
The initial posting to flickr.com from new Dell Vostro owner Jake Gordon occurred on May 1, 2008 (Day Zero). It was quickly picked up by online news outlets. Within 24 hours, Dell representatives were posting in the comment areas of these news outlets taking responsibility for the problem and promising to fix all affected laptops. Official blog posts from Dell came on day 7, by which time the mea culpa had already been put out to the market. Dell made good on its promises to replace all affected keyboards.
Now, several months later, what is the history of the event seen through the eyes of the Internet’s memory, Google? How did history write the crisis? Is it affecting the online reputation of the Dell Vostro product line, and more importantly, is it affecting the core Dell brand?
We looked at the top 20 search results for the incident using the search phrase “dell vostro keyboard problem” to see how balanced the results were. Then we examined search results for laptop line itself using the search phrase “dell vostro” to see how heavily the incident affects perception of the product line. Finally we searched on the core brand with the simple search phrase “dell”, to see how the incident might affect Dell’s reputation going forward.
The chart below visually demonstrates the top 20 search results for the incident, the product line, and the brand. The graph below is a visual representation of Google Search Results.
An ‘Acceptable’ box is a Google search result that isn’t related to the problem.
A ‘Mitigated’ box is a criticism of the company regarding the incident that includes mitigating comments from Dell to balance out a reader’s opinion.
A ‘Hostile’ box (there are none in this example) represents a criticism that either isn’t answered or isn’t answered satisfactorily.
Google Search on:
“dell vostro keyboard problem”
“dell vostro”
“dell”
Google Result #
1
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
2
Mitigated
Mitigated
Acceptable
Google Result #
3
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
4
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
5
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
6
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
7
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
8
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
9
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
10
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
11
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
12
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
13
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
14
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
15
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
16
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
17
Mitigated
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
18
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
19
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google Result #
20
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
As you can see from the chart, it’s impossible to suppress the incident, as it’s now indelibly associated with the product line. But as most PR professionals would hope, as you move away from the incident towards the product line and the core brand, the impact of the incident lessens.
What did Dell do right?
The lesson here is that in every search result that mentions the incident, there’s a statement from Dell taking responsibility and promising a fix. For someone considering buying a Dell computer, this is key. Accidents happen, but Dell will stand behind their product and make good when they do.
A note about Google results: Google results are fluid both from data center to data center and over time. As people find the results above more or less interesting, the results in our searches will change. For companies wishing to get rid of unpleasant news in Google searches about them, this is usually a benevolent event. For companies who wish to never see new bad news appear about them, this is a constant threat.
Creative Threatens Hobbyist
Creative makes a line of sound cards for PCs running Windows. A hobbyist (Daniel K) wrote better software to operate the sound cards for systems running Windows Vista, much to the delight of many unhappy sound card owners using Windows. In March of 2008 Creative became uncomfortable that an unlicensed third party was distributing modified versions of their sound card software and threatened him publicly, only to receive significant customer blowback.
The initial posting from Creative Labs VP of Public Relations Phil O’Shaugnessy criticizing the hobbyist appeared on March 28, 2008.
After several days of criticism, Phil or someone acting as a forum moderator actually altered the original posting to soften their criticism of the third party developer. The alteration caused several members of the forum to repost the original.
In addition, Wired news and other outlets ran with the story that Creative Labs had intentionally crippled their product for the Windows Vista platform, an accusation that is especially damaging. Most outlets echoed the product owners’ sentiments, namely that it was shameful that an unaffiliated developer could get the Creative product to perform so much better than the manufacturer itself.
After the initial flurry of controversy, Creative never found a way to address user concerns through public relations and stopped making public announcements.
You can see the effect that a lack of satisfactory resolution had in the search results for the incident (“creative labs vista driver problem”), for the product itself (“creative labs sound card”), and for the core brand (“creative labs”) as displayed in the chart of Google search results below.
The graph below is a visual representation of Google Search Results.
An ‘Acceptable’ box is a Google search result that isn’t related to the problem.
A ‘Mitigated’ box is a criticism of the company regarding the incident that includes mitigating comments from Creative Labs to balance out a reader’s opinion. Note that there aren’t any in this example.
A ‘Hostile’ box represents a criticism that either isn’t answered or isn’t answered satisfactorily.
Google Search On:
“creative labs vista driver problem”
“creative labs sound card”
“creative labs”
Google
Result #
1
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
2
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
3
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
4
Acceptable
Acceptable
Hostile
Google
Result #
5
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
6
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
7
Acceptable
Hostile
Acceptable
Google
Result #
8
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
9
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
10
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
11
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
12
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
13
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
14
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
15
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
16
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
17
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
18
Hostile
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
19
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
Google
Result #
20
Acceptable
Acceptable
Acceptable
What did Creative Labs do right? Almost nothing. In this table, "Hostile" boxes represent Google search results that are unfavorable to Creative Labs and have no adequate or balanced response. The column on the right is the worst of all possible outcomes: an outright criticism of the company is the fourth search result for the core brand. For someone considering purchasing any Creative Labs product, this item will give pause.
Creative Labs had all the options in the world available to them, but they chose a combative route to publicly embarrass and thwart someone who had earned the goodwill of their own customer base. He had, in effect, given customers better customer support than Creative had given, and they publicly took that away from their customers.
This graph shows that today, Creative Labs PR people still have a lot of work to do. This incident is tarnishing the reputation of the entire company.
What Can You Learn From This? The old cliché that “winners write history” should not just be taken as advice for PR professionals working online, but as a commandment. Communicate in the way you want the world to judge your handling of each incident, knowing that your words will be echoed online by dozens of outlets, large and small, and kept online for years to come.
Just as importantly, don’t forget to actually write it down. At some point be willing to go on the record. All the personal emails, telephone calls and good intentions in the world won’t matter if there is nothing written down for pundits to quote – or for Google to make part of Internet history.
Consider:
Timing: It’s almost always right to respond in some fashion, if only to set the record straight. The more outlandish the accusation, the less you have to worry about engaging your critic directly. If you don’t get something online for people to find, their criticism will stand unanswered forever.
Tone: It may seem attractive to vent anger at a critic, as in the case of Creative Labs Phil O’Shaugnessy who publicly threatened a developer, but those words will live forever, even if you try to edit or delete them. Take the higher ground. It will look better a year from now.
Target: You don’t always have to respond directly to all your critics, but consider that their Web sites will be around for a long time. Wouldn’t it be nice if they would incorporate your response into their article or blog post? Again, give them something to write down.
The cost of screwing up an incident in a big way is a very expensive search engine marketing campaign to try to push the unpleasant results out of the top 10 or 20 in Google. While that’s sometimes doable, do yourself a favor and get it right the first time.
On
Sunday October 19th, Nike sponsored the "Nike Women's Marathon" in San
Francisco. Two packs set out: first an "elite" group of individuals,
presumably wearing specially-provided Nike gear, and 20 minutes behind
them, the rest of the pack that entered the race.
Although the
elite group finished ahead of the pack (not hard when you have a 20
minute head start), a Chicago teacher named Arien O'Connell in the rear
group actually had the fastest time. Nike did not crown her the winner
though.
On Wednesday October 22nd, Nike posted a congratulatory note on their forums to the runners.
Anger had built up so much that 20 minutes later there was a complaint
on the forums that Arien O'Connell was ignored as the true winner
because she wasn't in the elite group, despite having the fastest
time.
Three hours later Nike put an announcement on the
forums saying that they were declaring Arien O'Connell 'a winner' and
giving her the same prizes as they gave the winner of the 'elite' group
of runners. They also announced there wouldn't be any more 'elite'
runners in future Nike Women's Marathons.
On October 23rd a writer with the SF Chronicle wrote an editorial condemning Nike
for declaring O'Connell 'a winner' and not 'the winner'. Associated
Press put out a story. It appeared that by October 23rd the story was
played out. How can you tell? For one, look at the Google searches
for "nike women's marathon". The
searches spike on race day and though they don't fall off as gently as
they should, they plunge back down to pre-race levels, indicating
people aren't that interested in the topic.
You can also examine the bump in searches for the term "nike":
While
lots of things will affect Nike's search traffic, the race itself
appears to have spiked traffic on the 19th with a falling off after.
The uptick at the end is probably not a resurgence of this story but
other news about Nike.
What should you learn from Nike's actions?
Acknowledge when you're wrong: Nike gave O'Connell the status of winner and scrapped the program, ending speculation that this would happen again.
All recent coverage incorporates Nike's response, which is mostly
satisfactory to the audience. Because Nike didn't feel like they could
withdraw the title of winner from the Elite winner as well, they are
still taking a little static for it but that appears to be waning.
Act quickly (a little more quickly than Nike): While
it seemed like Nike acted quickly, they actually took a long time. The
editorial that appeared the day after the race (the 20th) should have
generated an immediate response declaring O'Connell the winner and
cancelling all future "elite" runners. Instead they appeared to have
waited a few days. (Or perhaps that's just how long it took to make
the decision internally).
A quicker response would probably have muted the outcry snowball that Nike is now having to wait to slow down.
In a future article I'll probably work with Jason to examine the pace and rate of online conversations around this topic.
Disclosure: Neither Nike, nor any it's competitors or industry trade associations, are clients of Virilion.
