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:
-
Admit you were wrong
-
Stop doing the wrong thing
-
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 things about Circuit City are ripe for satire—a
characteristic that sets Circuit City apart from roughly zero other
companies out there. And they appropriately responded with sincerity
and self-deferential humor rather than PR jargon. The new
“cross-departmental task force” is arguably as clever as anything in
the MAD spread that originally started all this.
This article was written by Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn of Virilion Inc. You can read more of their work in the PRNewsOnline.com digital archives and at www.truthypr.com.
