TruthyPR

How Does Your Reputation Look In Google?

[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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Nike PR handles running community brushfire

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.

A day later, the SF Chronicle published an editorial condemning Nike that started the pot boiling with criticism of Nike.

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.

Responding to an Online Critic: Get your Timing, Target, and Tone Right

By Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn who spend their days conducting online PR, marketing, and advocacy campaigns for their employer, Virilion Inc. and spend their nights obsessing over frequency and duration of online discussions and conflicts.

[This article originally appeared on PRNews Online on September 24, 2008]

Clients and prospective clients routinely ask us how to respond to online critics. “Should we engage them directly? Should we let it blow over? Will it blow over? How should we respond?” People want to know the answers to these questions when they experience a challenge like the one we profiled in last month’s column about Circuit City and Mad Magazine.

There are three basic concepts you need to keep in mind when responding to an online critic: Target, Timing, and Tone. Get these three right and you’re on your way towards successfully directing the conversation.

 
Target: Who are you responding to?

Who you respond to is crucial, as responding can dignify the original criticism. In 1999, when candidate George W. Bush criticized Zack Exley’s Web site GWBush.com, Bush’s national profile raised an obscure, critical Web site to national prominence and created an audience of 100,000 visitors per day. Nowadays, there’s an additional problem: Google rank. Respond and link to a critic, and your raise their rank in Google. How much? It depends on how well trafficked your Web site is, but it’s never a good idea.

 
Timing: Is this the right time to respond?

Timing is one of the hardest things to get right with an online critic. If you view the verbal dog pile as damaging overall but the conversation has subsided, you don’t really want to reinvigorate it when you respond, especially if half the participants are likely on the other side of the conflict. You’ll simply restart the conversation and make it conversation-worthy for a longer time. What’s passed is past, let it go and do better next time.

 
Tone: Funny?  Apologetic?  Angry?

This is also tough to get right, especially for traditional communicators. If the public feels you did something wrong, you had better be apologetic. In last month’s article, Circuit City had most certainly (and unintentionally) made a mistake, so the lead of their response was an apology and a promise to not follow through with the bad act. However, it was also funny and self-deprecating.

If you don’t owe an apology, you’ve got to consider how your tone will affect the receptiveness of your response. Unless your job is to fire up an already committed audience, outrage is probably not the right attitude to adopt in your message. It turns off a reader who is trying to decide if what you’re saying is more valid than what your critic has said.

When in doubt, go with cool, analytical and, if you can pull it off, funny. If you can make people laugh even though they disagree with you, you’ve just bought yourself another shot at convincing them you’re right.

 
Online Critic Case Study: Edelman vs. Calacanis

The efficacy of PR firms is a popular target of do-it-yourselfers online. This “Why hire PR?” debate pops up online every year, and it surged again in late August.

Here the opening salvo came on August 21^st from serial Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Silicon Alley Reporter published his anti-PR-firm-screed, “How to get PR for your startup; Fire your PR company” (Calacanis says he didn’t write the title, but it certainly fits with the tone of the article). Provocatively written, Calacanis goes through a litany of good advice for tech company startup founders. But he includes a few suggestions—notably, fire your PR company and do it all yourself—that riled many of the post’s commentators and people throughout the blogosphere.

Discussion on the topic was swift and heated. Tech PR professionals and entrepreneurs who had both positive and negative experiences with PR firms joined in on the comments area of the original post at Silicon Alley Insider and throughout the blogosphere. But it was a short-lived discussion. Within 48 hours, as the graph below shows, the topic was no longer news. A trickle of comments on the original article and the blogosphere continued but steadily eroded as the conversation changed.

For an additional perspective, we pulled the data from digg.com, one of the Internet most popular places for stories to go viral. People who see stories around the Web vote them popular on digg.com. We pulled the timestamps of all the Digg votes to see how long this story was circulating and people still bothered to vote on it.

The data from digg.com clearly shows that the story was entirely dead the second day after it was posted.

However, an angry response came from Richard Edelman five days later, on August 26. Edelman, who had been on vacation, posted an outspoken refutation of Calacanis’ article, saying he wanted to “stop the open season on PR people.” When we saw Richard’s response, we immediately had three questions:

1. Why is Richard Edelman, the President and CEO of a $400+ million a year global public relations firm, responding directly to a guy who is considered “small time” even among successful Internet entrepreneurs?
2. What are Edelman’s communication goals with this response? Will phrases like “I am heartily sick of the ad hominem attacks and cheap shots” actually lead to undermining Calacanis’ credibility with entrepreneurs about whether to hire Tech PR companies?
3. And, finally, we wondered to ourselves, if we criticize Richard Edelman in our column, will we ever eat lunch in this town again? (Presumably we’ll need Jason Calacanis to pick up the check)

Why Does Richard Edelman Respond to Jason Calacanis?

While we haven’t spoken with Richard Edelman, there are three obvious reasons he might have responded. 

1. Calacanis is a long-time critic of the PR industry, and the PR-is-dead mantra has been repeated by him and others since the Web first brought down many of the barriers to DIY public relations. Edelman’s ripe-for-headlines response is a statement from one of the industry leaders speaking for PR professionals everywhere. To wit, from Kevin Dugan: “I love it when Richard Edelman weighs in on, and authoritatively defuses, silly pissing matches. REPRESENT!”
2. Edelman also has the advantage of a sterling reputation and an opponent who is better known for style than for substance. The Silicon Valley tabloid ValleyWag had already skewered Calacanis’s piece. He was writing on his own turf to an audience that he knew would generally be favorable to him.
3. Finally, Edelman is in charge of a globally recognized company. He introduced his response by saying that he received this link from multiple sources, so perhaps he wrote as a way to speak to his employees, colleagues, partners and clients, as much as he meant it for to Calacanis and other PR detractors. Ultimately, it was his side of the story that made it into O’Dwyers PR blog, not Calacanis’.

Evaluation: Timing

In this case, the conversation had almost entirely died when Richard Edelman waded into it. Comments on Jason’s original article and blogosphere echoes were all dwindling. It wasn’t even generating votes on digg.com anymore. They were briefly re-invigorated when Edelman’s blog post went up on the 26^th and several online outlets, such as O’Dwyer's, subsequently covered the tiff as a result. The night before Edelman’s post, PR maven Gina Rubel had made a similar mistake and stoked the previously dead embers of this discussion.

The fact is that no tech CEO is going to be convinced to hire a PR firm based upon the recommendation of a PR firm CEO because of the obvious conflict of interest. The resurgent discussion just gave a little more coverage to Calacanis’ original article which appears to speak to many tech company executives.

Evaluation: Target

In this case, Richard Edelman directly named and responded to Jason Calacanis and linked to his article. We find this to be poor strategy because:

1. Richard Edelman just helped raise Calacanis’ article’s Google rank by linking to it from his very prominent blog, something that he clearly probably wouldn’t have wanted to do compared to his stated goal of ending the hostility.
2. By responding to Calacanis directly, he also unwittingly treated Calacanis as an equal on this topic, something that is not true. Calacanis’ experience with PR for startups can be counted on three fingers, one for each startup he’s managed. Richard Edelman can draw upon the experiences of dozens of successful Edelman tech PR clients.
3. Edelman’s stature is miles above Calacanis. Edelman sits at the top of a very competitive heap of a large industry. Calacanis is a small time entrepreneur who’s had some small successes, but nothing of the caliber of Edelman’s global enterprise. 

Richard Edelman should probably have responded to the “fire your PR firm” concept here, and avoided directly identifying Calacanis in his response. At the very least, he shouldn’t have linked to him. On behalf of people who do public relations everywhere, we don’t appreciate one of the world’s leading PR people raising the Google rank of that article. Let’s not do that again.

Evaluation: Tone

In the case of Calacanis and Edelman, Calacanis didn’t criticize Edelman directly for the flaws of Tech PR, only the industry at large. Richard Edelman’s angry tone did nothing to refute the very cogent arguments presented by Calacanis’ article.  Edelman provided some very good reasons why Calacanis’ method won’t work for everyone, but they’re buried in the middle of his blog post and sandwiched with his opening and closing vindictive. In fact the tone probably led some observers to believe that Calacanis’ hit a little close to home for Edelman, thereby implying that it had some truth to it. 

Some examples of better responses

Much more entertaining and eviscerating was a funny response captured in the Internet cartoon, BitStrips, where they made fun of Calacanis’ giving the same bizarre advice (“Be Amazing. Be Everywhere. Be Real.”) to someone urging them to “Fire Your Bomb Squad”.

One of the commentators on Silicon Alley Insider, which published Calacanis’ piece, actually left a comment we think would have been more effective coming from Richard Edelman. Not surprisingly, it came from a public relations professional—specifically, Arthur Yann from the Public Relations Society of America.

Jason makes a number of excellent points, and if I was starting a company, you can bet I’d take many of his suggestions. Firing my public relations agency, however, wouldn’t be one of them. Here’s where I take issue with what he says. 

First, he seems to use "public relations" interchangeably with "publicity." Publicity is only one component of what public relations practitioners do today. In reality, the public relations value proposition provides key benefits cutting across professional, business and societal needs. If my business was facing a product recall or other serious crisis, I sure might like the help of public relations firm.

Next is the broad brush stroke that journalists hate public relations people and hate being pitched. Do journalists hate being pitched by public relations professionals who take the time to read their work, build a relationship with them and offer relevant news and insights they can’t get elsewhere (client-related or not)? Doubt it. Is that all public relations professionals? Of course not, but it’s also not cause for categorizing an entire industry of honorable, hard working men and women as "lazy and clueless." It’s like saying that all journalists are careless and stupid because a handful of stories contain errors and omissions.

Finally, many of the CEOs I have worked with already do the things Jason suggests in bonding and working with journalists. Only they do it through their public relations firm or team, because they don’t have the inclination, skills or time to do it themselves. Heck, even Jason himself admits that his "liaison" Tyler "keeps tabs on our journalist and blogger contacts ... reads their work, stays in contact with them ..." and "will hand me a stack of stories and background information on the people we're meeting with on the flight to another country so I can play catch up." Sounds like something a good public relations person would do.

(Arthur Yann is vice president of public relations for the Public Relations Society of America.) 

Conclusion

We are conscious of the fact that Richard Edelman’s blog post response was probably written in haste. He probably just came back into his office after being out for a few days to an e-mail box full of anger from employees and prospective clients who claimed that Jason Calacanis was dissing his profession and making it harder to land new clients. 

However, Richard Edelman is the President and CEO of a global public relations company that claims a strong digital expertise. By setting out with a communications goal to “stop the open season on PR people,” we expected a more effective response What followed was disappointing. Were someone to ask us as online communications professionals how we would have responded, we would have recommended either ignoring it until it flared up next time, or responding with something that acknowledged that the do-it-yourself approach recommended by Calacanis is not realistic for anyone but Jason Calacanis. 

Simply spitting back an amount of vitriol may exorcise your emotions, but it does little to actually deal with an opponent’s objections. When the final evaluation is done, nothing was really accomplished by Edelman’s response. It didn’t meet his stated goal of “ending the open season on PR people”.  It made some cogent arguments, but did it at a time when the attention of the online public had moved on to other issues, and obscured his best arguments in the angry invective that undermined them.  

However it also didn’t blow up in his face, which is good. A severely bad response would have actually led to an enormous resurgence of the conversation, with people pointing at Edelman’s angry response as proof that Jason had hit a nerve. It appears nobody really cared, and that saved him from re-invigorating a conversation he ostensibly was trying to terminate.

This issue will inevitably resurge again online. We hope someone else with a high-profile platform will respond with more expertise.

PRNewsOnline: How Circuit City’s PR Team Recovered From A Self-Inflicted Wound

by Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn, originally published at PRNewsOnline.com

In our last case study we showed how you actually have a couple of days when an online reputational crisis is brewing as long as you haven’t spoken yet.  In those cases, both Ford and Boing Boing hadn’t uttered a peep, and, despite a growing interest online, they had four or five days to react with their first statement before the online chatterati began their assault.

But what happens when you’ve spoken and it has only fed the fire?  At that point, you’re playing catch-up, and everything you do must be designed to minimize the damage.

The Crisis

On August 4th an operations employee at Circuit City noticed that the current issue of Mad Magazine, sold in select Circuit City stores, had a parody in it called “Sucker City.”  She didn’t find the parody funny, so she sent out the following note.  Consumerist.com, a popular and well-traveled consumer complaint site, got a hold of this e-mail and posted it on their Web site.

From: Elizabeth Barron, Corporate Operations
Approved message.

Immediately remove all issues and copies of "Mad Magazine" from your sales floor.  Destroy all copies and throw them away. They are not inventoried, and your store will not incur shrink.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this!

One page of the parody was available on Mad’s Web site as a preview to induce you to go buy the issue.  By trying to suppress the parody that would have otherwise languished in an issue, the objection increased its exposure.  This is affectionately referred to as the “Streisand Effect,” so named for Barbra Streisand’s campaign to take photos of her house off the Internet.  Her campaign has had the unintended result of disseminating those photos even further by giving them more notoriety.

The Circuit City story had two sides: tiny-classic-humor-magazine-past-its-prime versus big-dumb-retailer. Because both sides had been defined (as a result of the leaked internal memo), the chatterati began their work in earnest.   As you can see from the timeline above, over one hundred blogs and Web sites picked up the story in the first 24 hours.

The Reaction
Jim Babb of Circuit City’s communications team first heard about the Sunday night story through e-mail.  “The issue came to my attention first thing Monday morning.   Someone sent me an e-mail about the posting on Consumerist.com, but I probably would have spotted it on my own pretty quickly.”  Jim and his boss, Bill Cimino, quickly drafted a response specifically intending to incorporate the humor necessary for the context. 

Getting it approved is a different task, and required going to executives higher than themselves.  “Bill […] helped me get on executive radar quickly.  There was immediate agreement that we needed to respond not only quickly, but also in a manner befitting the subject matter. That quick access and approval made all the difference in responding.”

Here’s the response they sent to Consumerist’s editor Ben Popken, which was posted Monday afternoon about 24 hours after the original Consumerist story broke:

Hi, Ben,
I spotted the article about Circuit City and MAD Magazine on your site.

fyi, I became aware of this "situation" only this morning, and I have sent a note today to the Editors of MAD Magazine.

Speaking as "an embarrassed corporate PR Guy," I apologized for the fact that some overly sensitive souls at our corporate headquarters ordered the removal of the August issue of MAD Magazine from our stores. Please keep in mind that only 40 of our 700 stores sell magazines at all.

The parody of our newspaper ad in the August MAD was very clever. Most of us at Circuit City share a rich sense of humor and irony...but there are occasional temporary lapses.
We apologize for the knee-jerk reaction, and have issued a retraction order; the affected stores are being directed to put the magazines back on sale.

As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans.

In addition, I have offered to send the MAD Magazine Editor a $20.00 Circuit City Gift Card, toward the purchase of a Nintendo Wii....if he can find one!

All the best,
Jim Babb
Corporate Communications
Circuit City Stores, Inc.
Richmond, VA

Editor Popken then added his pithy summary of why he thought this was such a good response.  These points should be drilled into PR people daily as advice for handling reputational crises such as this one:

1. Admit you were wrong
2. Stop doing the wrong thing
3. Make a material gesture of apology

Circuit City got their response out as fast as possible, but not fast enough to catch an Associated Press story that hit the wires and was automatically published on hundreds of news Web sites across the Internet.  Over the next 24 hours, the Associated Press would update their story with Circuit City’s clever apology, but it would be picked up by an additional 100+ Web sites in the process.

Analysis and Lessons Learned
Given that this kerfuffle didn’t actually touch the core values of Circuit City, some communications professionals might have suggested that this would blow over quickly enough.  “I knew immediately there was no upside in taking on Alfred E. Neuman” said Circuit City’s Babb. “Beyond the obvious ‘this cannot be ignored’ element, the situation frankly called out for immediate action to correct the original mistake.  We responded quickly because it was the right thing to do, and because it made sense from a PR point of view.” 

By intervening and correcting the overly thin-skinned order of another employee, Circuit City sought to change the tone and direction of the coverage to come.  By the time they saw it, there was no way to stop the media and the blogosphere from talking about it, so Circuit City’s efforts could only slant the coverage in a positive manner and hopefully let the story die as fast as possible. 

By resolving the conflict and providing a sufficient mea culpa, they helped the story go away as quickly as possible.  You can see from the graph above that it worked, and the story died within thirty-six hours.

Note that, at about the same time the apology letter was published on Consumerist.com, the Associated Press put a story about this on the wires.  This is awful, as AP immediately promotes the issue from “online kerfuffle bandied about the blogosphere” to “light sarcasm for mainstream media.”  It’s the perfect story to make your audience laugh while poking fun at a large retailer that nobody is likely to defend. You can see from the next-day spike of television, newspaper, and radio station Web sites that the AP article gave the story an enormous follow-on audience.  This is partially due to the fact that so many media Web sites simply run AP stories without much review.

However, the apology does seem to have resolved the issue, ending any further interest from reporters or the public in the story.  It quickly dies one day later.  The smartest thing Circuit City could do is to cease discussing it any further.

What should you learn from this? 

Monitor the net for your brand: If you don’t have a formal monitoring system in place for your brand that would notify you within 12 hours of a high profile complaint, you need to get one immediately in place.  You can’t do it manually, and why would you want to?  Many services scan the Net and send you e-mail once a day (or more often) for not a lot of money.  “We normally check out the environment with the usual Google & Yahoo searches,” said Circuit City’s Babb, “but we also have a search engine that crawls the Web and sends us Circuit City references that it picks up.”

Remember the three lessons from Consumerist.com: As the editor of Consumerist recommended: Admit what you did.  Stop doing it.  And apologize in a material way for it. Circuit City’s response covered all three of these bases.  They admitted making a dumb move, ordered the magazines put back in stores, and offered a gift card to the editor of MAD.

Keep a sense of humor: Perhaps most important, Circuit City recognized what their Operations employee didn’t: Some