Posts Tagged ‘pr’

Twitter silence in a minor crisis.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Originally, I planned on blogging about Apple’s keynote address and how Twitter probably carried as much, if not more detail along with quicker commentary than any of the larger blog outlets would have managed.

Then something interesting happened this morning. I noticed the top trending topic on Twitter was AT&T. I hadn’t paid it much mind until I saw a friend of mine tweet, “RT @steveagee Dear AT&T, how does it feel to be the number 1 trending topic simply for being a piece of shit?” For the record, I don’t know or follow Steve Agee, but he brings up a good point.

I’d never want to be where AT&T is on twitter, nor would I want one of my clients there. The fact remains though, if you’re doing crisis communication, you damned well better to be prepared for that possibility.

Just for a little background, AT&T doesn’t support two very desired features on the iPhone. One is something called tethering, which basically lets you use your phone as a modem. The second and (apparently) more important one is MMS, which includes picture messages. While the iPhone on AT&T won’t support it, it can be supported on other carriers (in Europe) and other AT&T phones. Add to this the multitude of issues customers have with AT&T’s pricing structure. The latter probably wouldn’t be that bad if not for the other issues. It all adds up. Keep in mind this is a quick summary.

AT&T does have a twitter account, and it does tweet. How useful is it? They have around 5,500 followers but say nothing about the criticisms that iPhone customers have hurled their way. In fact, the twitter feed for AT&T contains a mind-numbing list of promotions. It’s not very useful and definitely not conversational.

AT&T’s situation is precarious. The Cult of Apple seems to be ready to cut the company off at the knees. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is starting to look at new carriers. Right now AT&T is taking the bad road of silence and finger pointing. Officially AT&T has said very little. They could take a lesson from Dominos and at least try and calm people down over twitter, but I don’t see that happening.

I can’t stress it enough – in today’s climate of conversation, you cannot ignore negative talk about your brand. It will not go away. Likely it will only get worse.

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

Quick Commentary on Amazon’s Current PR Situation

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Generally, it’s a bad idea to insult your critics. It will only fire them up.

Every now and again, I see some spokesperson try and explain some huge mistake with “there was a glitch in the system.” It’s a nice catchall, but do you seriously think that your audience is going to buy it?

Specifically, I’m referring to Amazon.com’s reaction to the discovery that they deleted gay-themed books from sales rankings and best-sellers lists. To paraphrase the CNET article: Author Mark Probst noticed Amazon removed hundreds of gay-themed books from the public rankings and best-sellers list. When he contacted Amazon, they said that “adult” themed books are removed from best-sellers lists.  The article goes on to note that books with much more graphic heterosexual themes did not make the ban list.

The result: the blogosphere, twitter and Facebook have lit up with protests against Amazon. Amazon chose to react by calling it a glitch. The problem with that is simple, people aren’t that stupid.

If you’re going to do something, anything, you need to think of how the public (not just your public) might react to it. If you think that you can get away with it, you’re dead wrong. I suggest that if you’re going to do something that any demographic or psychographic might get angry about, you should pass it by your PR agency or department first. Changes are, they’ll either come up with a better lie than “It was a glitch in the system” or simply tell you not to do it, that it’ll cost you too much money to fix in the long run.

My prediction: Should they stick with this reaction, this will follow Amazon for at least several years. I have a solution, but I’ll give that out when Amazon gives me a call.

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Posted in Public Relations | 2 Comments »