Marketing Through a Crisis

What is the natural behavior that shows up during a crisis? People either retreat or take charge. During a business crisis, meaning anything that could go wrong in business, from ecoli to crashed sites, the same energies show up. The marketer is the first person that an executive team will pursue to manage the situation. They will want to be told what to do. So what do you do? First don’t panic, look at the situation and establish what the worst potential outcome could be and what would be the best potential outcome, and start your response plan from there. The worst is to retreat and not address it; you will lose many, many customers plan and simple. The best is to be up front and address the issue head on with honesty and sincerity. It is the same as nurturing any relationship, own up to the mistake and reverse it while explaining what you are doing along the way.

Here are a couple of check list items to perform when a crisis occurs:

1. Identify worst and best case scenarios, develop the plan and materials for the worst case first so you are prepared and have thought things through. Don’t ignore the worst, it is human nature to try to focus of the best, but a marketer has to plan for the worst.
2. At the same time you are working on the plan for the worst, put a message on the home page of the site immediately with a paragraph or two describing the situation and if possible some information on solutions being developed.
3. Put together a web site, the domain could be specific to the crisis or establish a page on your regular web site. Even if you never turn this site on have it ready ASAP to publish when appropriate.
   1. Have several versions of the web site ready to go: the “it is resolved” version, the “it is in process of being resolved” version and the; “stand buy for more updates on the timing for the resolution” version. In each version be up front and honest, sincerity is the name of the game here.
4. If it feels appropriate put out a press release, nip any media criticism in the bud before it happens. When you put the release out you manage and mold the messaging.
   1. The release should be succinct and to the point: what happened; how did it happen; what is being done to resolve it; and any other relevant information that can help guide customers and vendors to personal solutions.
5. Contact the influencer bloggers and industry influencers and apprise them of the situation. By personally letting them know they become an ally.
6. Contact your best customers and apprise them of the situation, don’t let them hear it from somewhere else.

By being proactive on all fronts you are managing the message –you have it, it doesn’t have you. When you resolve a mistake/crisis in this manner you usually come out the other end better than you went in. Your quick action and open dialogue likely created more very loyal customers than less. Just as in life, how you handle you errors and life’s challenges is more important than the error itself.

Following is a blog post from Giovanni Gallucci on his blog, The Agency Blog. It talks about a crisis that occurred this past weekend to the MyBLogLog folks. This is a great example of how to manage it. I think raw and current is better than lawyered and manicured. Their response was real and the blogging community in particular responds to real. In a large corporate situation a slightly different tone might apply. At the end of the day, be a marketer and know you audience and know how to speak to your audience. The MyBlogLog  team did just that.

Following is Giovanni’s blog post, or click on the link to go direct to the his blog. http://www.theagencyblog.com/the_agency_blog/2007/02/mybloglog_hercu.html 

MyBlogLog's Stellar Support

By Giovanni Gallucci

Hats off the Eric, Scott and the rest of the MyBlogLog team at combating the inevitable issues that crop up when you launch a service that grows faster that one could have every hoped for.

Over the weekend the service was hammered by a hacker/spammer that found an exploit in their code-base whereby the hacker could invite someone to be a co-author to their blog but also approve them w/o the author's knowledge.

This created quite a bit of angst for the network's users and owners. So how did the MyBlogLog team handle the situation? They jumped in over the weekend and started patching the code. No big deal on many levels. You'd expect them to do just that. But they also blogged about the situation in detail and kept the user-base updated on the situation. Their response was perhaps one of the better ones I've seen lately in such situations. The Flickr.com team tends to do a good job at this also. The commentary on the MyBlogLog Blog was honest, raw and up to the minute:

Oh. My. Gosh. This weekend sucked. No doubt about it. But we've beaten things back and we have a plan for making things better still. I'm going to tell you all about that in a minute.

Well done indeed. It wasn't polished. It most likely wasn't vetted by legal or PR. Raw, honest, simple and to the point. PR/Marketing pros can learn from this.