5 ms·

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most bran

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-hitting outlets because it's been covered. Definitely won't work for all crises, but was eye-opening to me, and a good lesson to those of us with businesses. Bonus tip: the best / worst time to make a social media complaint is on a Friday night - most businesses don't pay someone to monitor social media on the weekend, and conversely most people interact when they're not at work, so complaints are more likely to go viral without a response for many days.

hkmurakami 14y ago
I immediately thought of the more serious/alarming crisis PR botch-jobs of late: the Toyota brake-sticking crisis and the Sony Entertainment account info hack. I don't think silence would work in either of these cases, but perhaps 'burning' would?
bravura 14y ago
Is burning a story still effective? HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral. So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  HuffPo doesn't rise to the level of "mid-tier" - they are definitely less Relevant (at least in the united States) than the mid-50 media outlets, and don't even compare to something like the Top Tier (NYT, WSJ, Tribute, LA Times). For example, from HN Search: Results 1-10 of 493 for http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ Results 1-10 of 12,273 for nytimes.com
  - mseebach 14y ago
    So, my gut feeling says you're right, but your methodology here is wrong: HN aggressively encourages sharing the original story, cutting out any intermediates. HP, for all their reach in making stories go viral, don't actually produce a lot of original content. When something is on NYT, it is generally original.
  - lnanek2 14y ago
    Doesn't really matter how many stories. Matters how many see them and who the people who see them are. If your target market is PC gamers, a viral story from an online site could hit your target audience right where most of them will notice it. Last time I read a times article was when Tesla revealed their stories are fake.
rmc 14y ago
Can you expand on the burn thing for those of us who don't know much about pr? Is it just because hard hitting journalists don't like to be second?
- buro9 14y ago
  Pretty much. All journalists don't like to be second, but most don't get a say (they work in quantity not quality). Journalists need exclusives, just re-hashing an existing story doesn't offer a compelling reason to the reader to choose your news outlet. So the top-tier outlets will only want to spend their column inches and reader attention on the stories that give a compelling reason for them to continue returning... that is, exclusive stories and additional depth into breaking news.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    To expand on it a little, People are naturally averse to being redundant when they're conscious of it. If the work has been done, why repeat? As a writer, I dislike writing things that have been written: if I don't have something new to say, why say it? (There are good reasons to repeat, e.g. practice, but that doesn't apply here.)
PakG1 14y ago
Definitely won't work for all crises The golden standard for PR crisis management is probably Johnson & Johnson: http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurders/crisis.html http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurde... They definitely didn't choose silence. You're right, you definitely have to choose your strategy carefully, depending on your situation.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  If something goes wrong and it's your fault and you don't want to pay the consequences, silence may not be so bad. J&J had the opposite situation. Something went wrong and it wasn't their fault. Choosing to pay the consequences anyway made them look double good; once for taking responsibility, and again for doing it when other companies might've walked away. The problem with EA is not so much their PR strategy per se, but their general unwillingness to fix fuckups. No amount of marketing can fix a fundamentally broken company.
- eli 14y ago
  It's also a strategy that's so hard to follow that even Johnson & Johnson has had trouble replicating it in later disasters (it also didn't hurt that J&J was completely blameless of the original charge). On The Media had a nice story about it in reference to the Toyota "unintended acceleration" issue: http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/ (transcript: http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/...)
- lobotryas 14y ago
  The "Tylenol case" was a "sniper-fire crsis" - aka, a crisis caused by an outside force, like a psychotic killer. In this case no one's going to root for the serial killer regardless of how much the company may be at fault. Also, J&J has a long history of manufacturing popular products and has a good reputation with the general populace. These are the major factors that allowed J&J to handle the situation in the way that it did. Conversely, if a client is in tabacco, genetics or weapons manufacturing then the tactics adopted by J&J will be completely useless to them. Saying that the "Tylenol case" is a golden standard is missing the big picture. For anyone out there interested in crisis PR I highly recommend "Damage Control": http://www.amazon.com/Damage-Control-Revised-Updated-Management/dp/1935212249/ http://www.amazon.com/Damage-Control-Revised-Updated-Managem...
PavlovsCat 14y ago
If you lie in such a crude fashion and get caught, then screw anyone giving you tips how to cover it up. Let's not even fantasize about hacker ethics; just get some ethics period.
Spooky23 14y ago
Silence is a great tool, especially initially. Many places that feel that they need to "do something" end up speaking before they really understand what is going on. So you have the bigger risk of either making content-free statements that everyone sees through, or worse making incorrect statement that feed that flames that your organization is incompetent.

hkmurakami 14y ago

I immediately thought of the more serious/alarming crisis PR botch-jobs of late: the Toyota brake-sticking crisis and the Sony Entertainment account info hack. I don't think silence would work in either of these cases, but perhaps 'burning' would?

bravura 14y ago

Is burning a story still effective? HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral. So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.

ghshephard 14y ago
HuffPo doesn't rise to the level of "mid-tier" - they are definitely less Relevant (at least in the united States) than the mid-50 media outlets, and don't even compare to something like the Top Tier (NYT, WSJ, Tribute, LA Times). For example, from HN Search: Results 1-10 of 493 for http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ Results 1-10 of 12,273 for nytimes.com
- mseebach 14y ago
  So, my gut feeling says you're right, but your methodology here is wrong: HN aggressively encourages sharing the original story, cutting out any intermediates. HP, for all their reach in making stories go viral, don't actually produce a lot of original content. When something is on NYT, it is generally original.
- lnanek2 14y ago
  Doesn't really matter how many stories. Matters how many see them and who the people who see them are. If your target market is PC gamers, a viral story from an online site could hit your target audience right where most of them will notice it. Last time I read a times article was when Tesla revealed their stories are fake.

rmc 14y ago

Can you expand on the burn thing for those of us who don't know much about pr? Is it just because hard hitting journalists don't like to be second?

buro9 14y ago
Pretty much. All journalists don't like to be second, but most don't get a say (they work in quantity not quality). Journalists need exclusives, just re-hashing an existing story doesn't offer a compelling reason to the reader to choose your news outlet. So the top-tier outlets will only want to spend their column inches and reader attention on the stories that give a compelling reason for them to continue returning... that is, exclusive stories and additional depth into breaking news.
- saraid216 14y ago
  To expand on it a little, People are naturally averse to being redundant when they're conscious of it. If the work has been done, why repeat? As a writer, I dislike writing things that have been written: if I don't have something new to say, why say it? (There are good reasons to repeat, e.g. practice, but that doesn't apply here.)

PakG1 14y ago

Definitely won't work for all crises The golden standard for PR crisis management is probably Johnson & Johnson: http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurders/crisis.html http://www.aerobiologicalengineering.com/wxk116/TylenolMurde... They definitely didn't choose silence. You're right, you definitely have to choose your strategy carefully, depending on your situation.

skrebbel 14y ago
If something goes wrong and it's your fault and you don't want to pay the consequences, silence may not be so bad. J&J had the opposite situation. Something went wrong and it wasn't their fault. Choosing to pay the consequences anyway made them look double good; once for taking responsibility, and again for doing it when other companies might've walked away. The problem with EA is not so much their PR strategy per se, but their general unwillingness to fix fuckups. No amount of marketing can fix a fundamentally broken company.
eli 14y ago
It's also a strategy that's so hard to follow that even Johnson & Johnson has had trouble replicating it in later disasters (it also didn't hurt that J&J was completely blameless of the original charge). On The Media had a nice story about it in reference to the Toyota "unintended acceleration" issue: http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/ (transcript: http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/transcript/ http://www.onthemedia.org/2010/feb/12/better-safe-and-sorry/...)
lobotryas 14y ago
The "Tylenol case" was a "sniper-fire crsis" - aka, a crisis caused by an outside force, like a psychotic killer. In this case no one's going to root for the serial killer regardless of how much the company may be at fault. Also, J&J has a long history of manufacturing popular products and has a good reputation with the general populace. These are the major factors that allowed J&J to handle the situation in the way that it did. Conversely, if a client is in tabacco, genetics or weapons manufacturing then the tactics adopted by J&J will be completely useless to them. Saying that the "Tylenol case" is a golden standard is missing the big picture. For anyone out there interested in crisis PR I highly recommend "Damage Control": http://www.amazon.com/Damage-Control-Revised-Updated-Management/dp/1935212249/ http://www.amazon.com/Damage-Control-Revised-Updated-Managem...

PavlovsCat 14y ago

If you lie in such a crude fashion and get caught, then screw anyone giving you tips how to cover it up. Let's not even fantasize about hacker ethics; just get some ethics period.

Spooky23 14y ago

Silence is a great tool, especially initially. Many places that feel that they need to "do something" end up speaking before they really understand what is going on. So you have the bigger risk of either making content-free statements that everyone sees through, or worse making incorrect statement that feed that flames that your organization is incompetent.