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Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women valued at over 2.9 billion dollars, was refused 3 times the opportunity to examine and purchase a 37 thousand dollar Tom Ford handbag. This happened at a posh upscale boutique in Switzerland.
The resulting news and social media backlash for the boutique involved and Switzerland itself (the country’s tourism office also apologized to her) was rapid and explosive, with negative commentary from news organizations, Facebook, Twitter, media publications and the like chiming in. Don’t be surprised by this! Anything that touches on deeply personal values (racism, gender equality, lifestyle, health, etc.) will quickly mushroom into an immense social media unconscious event. It will either become a social media dream or in this particular case…the ultimate social media brand reputation management nightmare.
This wake up call provides a powerful opportunity for businesses regarding their reputation management process. Not every business has a plan in place and for those who don’t know where to start, consider these 3 compelling reputation management tips....
As I watch this crisis unfold, only 150 miles away from my home in Montreal, there are two things in particular that stand out: the crisis leadership and communications fail of the Chicago-based company that owns the train, Rail World Inc., and the executive Chairman that everyone looked to for leadership, but was no where to be found, Edward Burkhardt.
Rail World Inc.’s crisis communications failThe biggest communications fails are those (crisis communications) that do not exist, and those that come across as insincere and half-assed in a crisis situation.I wish I could report to you that Rail World Inc. had at least utilized social media as a communications tool for communicating with stakeholders, the media and concerned residents of the Lac-Mégantic community, but unfortunately I can’t. The company has zero corporate social presence and I suppose it never occurred to them to create, at the very least, a Twitter account to keep stakeholders updated throughout the crisis....
Earlier this week, I posted about the Facebook meltdown and trials and tribulations of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale. Arizona (Epic Facebook meltdown, PR fail or publicity ploy?). This un-reality show couldn’t get much stranger. It has more twists, turns and intrigue than a Shakespearean tragedy. Or maybe the Keystone Cops would be more accurate? The bistro was featured in a raucous season finale episode on Kitchen Nightmares featuring explosive celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. It was an entertaining and highly-charged reality TV episode complete with drama, screaming, yelling, heroes and villains....
Owner Samy threatens diner after 90 min wait for pizza" You're about to witness one of the biggest social media meltdowns and PR fails in the short recorded history of the Internet. The big question is was it all a staged publicity stunt? It all happened on the season finale of chef Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.
Fans dressing up as their favorite movie characters while attending opening weekend film showings is nothing new. However, costumed moviegoers who partnered with Capital 8 Theatres in Missouri to promote the premiere ofIron Man 3 recently caused a panic, for which the theater is now apologizing. Had the cosplayers been dressed as Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, we imagine no one would have been particularly alarmed, but some group members donned S.H.I.E.L.D agent costumes — complete with fake firearms — which, given last year’s tragic shooting at an Aurora, COmovie theater (and the current high-alert mentality when it comes to guns), might not have been the best idea. Moviegoers, understandably frightened by the sight of people dressed in what appeared to be body armor and carrying assault rifles, called the local police. Once the dust settled, the complaints began rolling in and the theater was skewered on social media, some even accusing Capital 8 of intentionally causing the kerfuffle as a publicity stunt. In response, the company issued the following apology...
Carnival cruise experiences multiple technical problems resulting in negative media coverage based on MediaMiser's monitoring and analysis.
Poland Spring, American Airlines, Taco Bell and NASCAR all make our list. The year is less than three months old, yet already several brands have made king-sized screwups in social media. Among their crimes: Using a four-letter word to insult a nine-year-old girl. Live-tweeting a mass layoff. And angering Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. Poland Spring, American Airlines, Taco Bell and NASCAR are among the brands who should have known better. All of the following social media fails triggered hundreds or thousands of responses, and made headlines in the regular media as a result....
A note to readers: While most of the PR failures we write about are unfortunate, they are also amusing (on some level). This one, however, cannot be categorized as anything but horrifically insensitive, bordering on cruel. Relatives of the victims of last summer’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado recently received invitations from Cinemark USA to attend the reopening of the same theater at which their loved ones lost their lives. The invitations, which were sent just after the holidays, urged recipients to “reserve [their] tickets” for an evening of remembrance and a movie to follow. In response, family members sent a strongly-worded letter to Cinemark in which they expressed anger and outrage at the company’s lack of compassion, calling the invitation “disgusting”. They also noted that Cinemark representatives never reached out to offer their condolences; the company even rebuffed requests to meet with family members without lawyers present. The letter admonishes the reopening celebration as a “thinly veiled publicity ploy” and calls for a boycott of the theater....
Samsung cancels blogger’s airplane ticket on press trip for refusing to write about brand. ...I think the correct place to begin is in understanding and acknowledging that this is a public relations disaster. Samsung and it’s agency were clearly not geared to handle this. The story has become quite popular and Samsung’s competitor Nokia has definitely gained some good PR due to this, by helping the stranded blogger. As you’ll learn thru this article, Samsung isn’t a stranger to such a debacle. This isn’t the first time Samsung has trended up the social media channels for the wrong reasons.
The rest of the post is dedicated to answering two questions:
1. How could this Public Relations nightmare been handled better?
2. How can one avoid such a Public Relations nightmare?...
[This PR fail was easily avoided. Unfortunately, Samsung didn't get it - JD]
A brother’s passion turned into a media maelstrom for Progressive Insurance after a blog post went viral. It all started after Katie Fisher, who was insured by Progressive, was killed in a 2010 car accident. The underinsured driver of the other car ran a red light, killing Katie instantly. For two years, her family fought to receive the full amount of her insurance policy. When Progressive wouldn’t pay, the family was forced to sue the driver to prove negligence, and Progressive allegedly offered legal counsel to the defendant. In effect, defending a client’s killer against the client’s interest. Katie’s brother, Matt, eventually wrote a blog post that was picked up by thousands of Twitter users. What resulted is detailed in the video above. It’s a cautionary tale of how social media and bad public relations can quickly affect the outcome of a case.
Declaring a matter "closed" doesn't make it so. The University of Pennsylvania may learn that lesson the hard way. On Thursday the Vice Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Penn resigned. Turns out Doug E. Lynch didn't have the PhD he claimed to have from Columbia University. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, a University spokeswoman said on Wednesday that Lynch was "unaware he didn't have the degree." Yeah, it is SO hard to keep track of those things....
The pizza chain became a lightning rod for criticism after it insulted an Asian-American woman, and the incident provides crisis lessons for all PR pros.
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So, you set out to create a website, accessible to the public, aimed at helping your employees budget. You have hopes of helping them out, but let’s be real here, you’re also looking to grab you some good PR in the process. Once you get started, however, you realize that there is no way a typical employee at your organization makes enough to live on, even with a second job, and leaving out minor expenses like food, water, and clothing…because those are luxury items, right?
Most of us would scrap the project on the spot, but not McDonald’s! The company, which has already run into a few stumbling blocks while getting acquainted with how the modern web works, must not have thought it was a problem because they went live. As could be expected, the company took a beating in the media, largely as result of the buzz generated following video, from the activists at Low Pay is Not Okay:
Half measures rarely work in sports or apologies. The media are reporting that Nike is cutting ties with Livestrong, the cancer-fighting foundation started by Lance Armstrong. Armstrong himself broke away from Livestrong months ago in hopes of minimizing the blow back the charity received from news that the bicyclist finally admitted the long-rumored story that he had used performance enhancing drugs. The New York Times today reminds us that Nike stood by Tiger Woods after his reputation had a collision with a fire hydrant - and it initiate a new endorsement deal with Michael Vick after the quarterback got out of prison where he did time because of his role in dog fighting ring. But Nike is abandoning the Foundation built on Armstrong's reputation....
As long as this aspect of our culture remains true, I would argue the problem is really one of society and that we are all complicit to some degree. It is not a coincidence that virtually all fashion and cosmetic companies behave somewhat similarly to Abercrombie & Fitch. Among the mainstream brands, perhaps only Dove, with its real beauty campaign, has ever seriously committed to a marketing campaign with a counter-culture heart. If Jeffries did anything, he figured out his customer’s aspirations and designed advertising that appears to fulfill them. This has, and likely always will be, his job as a marketer. In that sense, he’s perhaps only guilty of being both good at his job and terrible at PR....
The two owners of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro took over the restaurant's Facebook page last night to fight unruly commenters, and man, was it embarrassing.
RBC broke the first rule of public relations, failing to plan for the possibility that employees whose jobs were being outsourced would be upset and take their complaints public, says one PR expert. In February, 45 of the bank's personnel were informed that they would be replaced by outsourced workers after the bank contracted a number of technological services to iGate, a California-based firm that specializes in sending jobs offshore. According to an RBC employee, personnel were given 90 days' notice. At least one of the Canadian employees complained that she was asked to train her own foreign replacement....
An Exxon parody Twitter account is tweeting fake public relations updates about the oil company's ruptured Pegasus pipeline, which spilled at least 84,000 gallons of heavy crude oil into residential streets in Mayflower, Ark., last week. The account was inspired by @BPGlobalPR, a fake BP account that attracted tens of thousands of followers after the infamous Deepwater Horizon blowout. (The real BP Twitter account, @BP_America, has just 52,000 followers, compared with the parody account's 145,000.) Though it only began tweeting Tuesday, the parody Exxon account @ExxonCares has garnered more than 600 followers and has sent tweets mocking the company's response to the spill. ExxonMobil has more than 34,000 real Twitter followers....
Well, the cover-up continues from the Paterno family over the ballyhoo created by Jerry Sandusky's tragic child abuse right under the big ol' schnoz of the entire Penn State athletics department. Take this headline from PennLive.com and Central Pennsylvania's Patriot News: 'Victim lawyer calls Paterno family response a PR gambit.' Of course it is. The family wants to repair its image, tarnished as a result of its patriarch's chronic neck problem. You know? Turning the other way.
The article discusses the investigation commissioned by Penn State and conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh. The scathing — and third-party — report found Paterno, former President Graham Spanier, retired senior vice president Gary Schultz, and on-leave athletic director Tim Curley covered up child abuse allegations against Sandusky. Yet, the Paterno family claims those conclusions were unfounded....
Amid accusations of price gouging, startup Uber started swallowing costs. Uber, a company that makes an app you can use to summon a livery cab, had to deal with an extremely messy situation in New York yesterday.
Now it's having to deal with obnoxious punditry....
To get the drivers to pick up Uber customers, Uber had to start paying them 2X their normal rate.
At first, Uber passed this rate increase onto its customers through a program it calls "surge pricing."
But then customers and reporters started complaining, saying that Uber was "price gouging" in the middle of a disaster....
[Big challenge, bad PR hits small startup ~ Jeff]
Bloggers take to Twitter against Samsung, Public opinion turns against the phone maker, after it allegedly left a blogger stranded in Germany, Technology... Did Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd take bloggers from India to Germany with the understanding that they were to cover the Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA) consumer electronics show in Berlin, only to change their roles from reporters to promoters at the last minute? Or, was it a simple misunderstanding between the bloggers and the Korean electronics maker’s public relations team?... [Samsung could have easily avoided this big PR Fail. It didn't - JD]
Seems like every year is here is some sort of PR fail or chick-fli-al that goes beyond a simple slip up to epic proportions. And... looks like we are approaching Critical Fail with Chick-fil-A ‘s ever expanding controversy over its stance on gay marriage. What started out as a protest against Chick-fil-A giving money to anti gay marriage organizations has blown up to letters from various mayors wanting Chick-fil-A out of there towns and even a reported fake facebook account using a stock photo image. Reminds me somewhat of the Ocean Marketing Fail (although that still ranks far higher in epicness)....
Whenever clients tell me they just don't see the need to invest in a crisis management strategy ahead of potential scandals or even as the scandal is unfolding- I will remind them of this story from Reuters about the expense of digging oneself up and out of a hole inaction and poor decision making created....
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Business owners should always be considering what their actions will do for their reputation!
We help companies develop the plan and then procide the system to run it smoothly. Check us out at http://www.reviewwatchman.com