Altyrian View

Sometimes a healthy dose of controversy is a good thing. Take Conservative Cafe as covered by the Chicago Tribune. This unique coffee shop serves up “Radical Right” coffee with pictures of Ronald Reagan on the wall and Ann Coulter’s books stacked by the fireplace. The last sentence of the article sums it all up:

“If I called it ‘Dave’s Cafe,’ no one would talk about it. There’s nothing intriguing about that.”

Exactly right, Dave! Sometimes in PR we want to avoid controversy, but we have to remember that sometimes creating (yes, creating) controversy is a good thing.

A friend of mine used to run political campaigns. He would choose a campaign issue that no one cared about except for 10% of his opponent’s base, and his candidate would take the opposing viewpoint. His candidate would get free press talking about an issue that did not hurt him politically but would fire up his opponent. His opponent would focus on this unimportant campaign issue while his candidate could expand his message. This tactic won many political races for my friend. Remember, keep your eye on the ball.

That’s my Altyrian View.

On my way to work on Monday, I caught her press conference about her South African school’s sex scandal. If you missed it, it’s worth a watch. It is always fun to see someone use crisis management best practices when handing a nasty story. Here’s the vid. More after the break.

Classic crisis communications. Provide the facts. Identify what you did to stop the problem immediately. Provide details about the research you are doing to identify where the system broke down and how you can fix it. Provide details of how you are moving forward with checks in place to protect from the same happening again. Say you are sorry.

If you want to see more about the story, be sure to check out PR. Differently. Peter Shankman did a great interview about the topic.

Circuit City board room:

“Here’s what we are going to do. We are going to fire all of our over-paid employees and replace them with people who we don’t have to pay much.”

“Gee, wouldn’t that get rid of our most loyal, best-trained employees?”

“Nahh. They could re-apply for a job after three weeks. At that point, we can hire them for less.”

“So what are we going to tell our employees and the public.”

“The absolute, no-holds-barred truth.”

Of course, I’m paraphrasing. Let’s face it, companies make these decisions every day: Overhead reduction by laying off highly-paid staff. What is unusual is that a company take the insane approach of Circuit City and spell out exactly what they are going to do.

Before we discuss how best to break this news, let’s step back for a minute and look at the wisdom of such an approach by CC. Indeed, they are removing their best, most loyal employees. Worst yet, they are sending the message to their other employees (including the managers that run the store) that there is no room for financial advancement at CC. If I’m looking for a job, I’m headed to Best Buy.

There are tons of ways that they could have done this better. First, you don’t have to fire all of those employees. CC should have offered optional pay reductions. Sure, 9 out of 10 of the employees would have run out of the front door, but that sure plays better in the media. Better yet, you get to keep some of those “highly-valued” employees.

If CC was really determined to lose those employees, they should have done some of it quietly by attrition. Let the employees know that cuts are coming, and their salaries are not safe. You quickly trim some of your staff without a major announcement and without ruining your pool of potential employees.

It’s rare that the honest approach is not the best approach, but in this case, the truth is so inhumanely dumb, you would think that CC would have at least tried to spin something positive out of it. But the stock did go up – only to fall again yesterday.

In case you avoided news over the weekend, an infant was abducted from Covenant Lakeside Hospital in Texas by a woman posing as a nurse. Fortunately baby was found safe in New Mexico a couple of days later. I take great interest in communications around abductions like this because I prepared the crisis communications plan for The Women’s Hospital of Greensboro when I worked there about 8 years ago. Since the majority of our patient population was newborns, we worked up an abduction crisis for the plan. It has been a long time, but I’m pretty sure one of our plan steps was not “hide under a rock.” That’s what Covenant Lakeside has chosen to do.

Unfortunately, I did not see Covenant’s first statement, and it’s probably a good thing. Although I didn’t see it, I’ve been told that it was something along the lines of “clearly we need to strengthen our security measures.” Ummm, yeah. Since I didn’t find the statement with a Google search, I figured I would visit the Covenant Web site to check things out. (To be fair, I can only say that this statement is hearsay until I find the link. If you can find a link to the statement, pass it on, please.)

Nothing about the crisis. The latest “news” is a new president and CEO. As a matter of fact, I learn that every link to Lakeside has been deactivated. I’m sure that this was not a coincidence. I’m sure that reporters in Texas are getting the runaround because of “HIPAA privacy regulations.”

Covenant, it’s not too late! Use your Web site as a way to manage the crisis. Even if you are speaking to local press, it’s not enough. So much of your audience is looking to the Web for news. Help your patients feel safe. Don’t tell us what you are going to do tomorrow; tell us what you have already done to keep this from happening again.

If you live in the Southeast region of the US, you know that tomorrow is pretty much a holiday. At noon, most workdays will be over. Schools won’t be closed, but books will be. It’s the ACC tournament.

For those of you not from the area, the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament is a pretty big deal in this area. (There is a PR lesson here, stick with me while I gush about the tourney.) From where I am sitting right now, I am within an hour of Wake Forest, Duke, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina. The rivalries are fierce, and anyone can win it all. Over the next four days, there will be 11 hotly contested games. I can’t wait!

Although people talk about the life lessons of basketball, there is a great PR lesson that we can learn from this past week’s action. During Sunday’s Duke (I’m a UNC fan, but I’ll refrain from spelling Dook “correctly”) / UNC game, there was a hard foul on a UNC player at the end of the game that drew some blood. Actually, a lot of blood. Since the UNC / Duke rivalry is so intense, this is obviously what sports writers have been talking about for the last 5 days. Coach K (Duke’s coach) said all the right things at the press conference until he made this statement:

And the game was over before that. I mean the outcome of the game, let’s put it that way. That’s unfortunate, too, that those people were in the game in that play.

If you read between the lines, he was saying “the game was over, and UNC should have pulled its starters.” In a small way he was blaming UNC’s coach for still having his star player in the game.

Here’s our lesson for today. No matter what happens, never, ever, ever blame the victim. Even if it was his or her fault. As soon as you do that, people stop talking about your apology, and they focus on your being caddy in your remarks. In this case, Coach K is catching lots of heat about the situation, and unfortunately, he could have killed it at the end of the game during his first press conference. Every interview he has done for the last 5 days has centered around this situation. That’s way the first statement you make is always the most important one – no matter how short it is.

So now I’m off to see how this plays out. Go Heels!

The Daily Dog has a write-up of the Taco Bell crisis communications centering around the rat-infested restaurant. Yuck! And I’m not just talking about the rats.

First a little background: Yum Brands owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC. ADF Companies is a major franchisee that owns more than 350 fast food restaurants – not a mom & pop franchisee. So what happens? Yum Brands closes the rat restaurant and a few more in NY pending inspections. Gee thanks. ADF, the company that should be stepping up to the plate, seems totally out of the loop on this one. As a matter of fact, the spokesperson didn’t even know exactly how many stores were closed!

First, ADF & Yum need to be on the same page here. Day one, they should have a team – I don’t care if it takes just one exterminator – a team of exterminators to get rid of the rats. Close the store for a few days – even if it only takes one – to make sure that the problem is solved. Demand another inspection. Blame the inspector for not finding the problem (nicely, of course) – do you expect the $10 / hour high school kid to be looking in cracks trying to find rats? Behind the scenes, check out the other restaurants to make sure that rats aren’t a problem.

Instead, Yum destroys its brand in NYC and across the country. If a store has rats, one might guess that they could have traveled next door – maybe down the street. It’s less likely to believe that rats are taking rides in people’s cars and stopping at the next Taco Bell. According to Yum, rats in NYC have singled out Taco Bell as the place to hang out. Yum is saying, “our stores are nasty, and because of poor management, we have this problem all over the city.” WTG.