PR tip: how to maintain your Company's goodwill

Yesterday's some of the social media biggest barometers were off the charts. Why? Facebook essentially chose to pull the rug out from under its users with a highly questionable Terms of Service (TOS) change. Almost 6,000 people have dugg Facebook's move on Digg and on Twitter yesterday both TOS and Facebook were top 5 trend topics all day and into the night. This move could have been handled differently to maintain PR goodwill. Was there only one option for Facebook to make here? I understand, as I think all users of social networks and other social media sites, that increasingly the web is opening up so sites can share data more easily with each other. When a user chooses to share their data publicly, it no longer distinctly belongs to them. However, the mistake that Facebook made was that they originally told their users that they were free to delete their account and with that account deletion, their data went with them. Then without any warning or grace period, Facebook pulls an about face (pun intended) and reneges on its own TOS with users, basically telling all 100+ million of them, guess what? We changed our mind and your data, it isn't yours any longer, it's ours and we can do whatever we want with it, whenever we want. Period. Instead of following their lawyers' advice, perhaps Facebook ought to have followed their PR team’s advice and taken a different approach. Clearly, we’re unsure how things really unfolded, but too often companies follow the legal advice (i.e.: ‘just say no comment’) instead of taking control of a developing crisis and having less fallout. Right now, Facebook has created a tremendous amount of bad will and that is unfortunate. It is a hard lesson that others may want to remember and avoid.

PR tip: how to avoid a Twitter meltdown

By now many have heard about Christian Bale and his very unprofessional melt down captured and shared among millions on YouTube, which spread like wildfire into a top 5 topic on Twitter. The following Twitter meltdown unfolded today. Thankfully, the exchange was not at all as brutal as Christian Bale's outburst but, nevertheless this could have been avoided. To set the stage, the Twitter melt down involves a male and female, one a reporter and the other a Marketing/PR representative.

The following exchange captures the f-bombs and tweets going back and forth between the two parties. April, the PR rep, wasn't naming the reporter directly when she posted a tweet, venting her frustration, just as many of us do on Twitter (yours truly included). The reporter clearly had a bad day, noticed the PR rep’s tweet and followed up in a highly abusive way with her. After the Twitter throw-down, it seemed like the reporter wanted to forget about the whole exchange and consequently tried to erase his tweets. Unfortunately, the public journo/PR fight got retweeted and suddenly it was all over. Lesson to be learned here. Before you go dropping any F-bombs via a tweet, digg post, IM, blog comment, facebook post, etc., do remember you can't erase what is out there on the ether. A public record exists and there is no turning back.   

American Airline's PR faux pas

I thought about American Airline's recent PR blunder the other day. The airline company took a pre-emptive strike and boldly announced they will now be charging customers a $15 surcharge for transporting each piece of luggage for their trip. Well that piece of news made the headlines on tv, radio, print and online, and needless to say, it was not well received. Travelers are already being hit with airport fees, additional security fees and rising ticket prices, the $15 per bag charge is hardly trivial, especially if you're taking your family on vacation. Yet the reality is that prices everywhere are rising due to runaway gas prices. It's typical for manufacturers and suppliers to pass the costs on to consumers; and lately, rising costs across the board are the norm these days. Clearly, the amount of fuel airlines require to operate their planes is skyrocketing and consumers are well aware of this fact. As consumers, we would have expected to see and pay for higher ticket prices. Are other airlines likely to follow American's move? I doubt it. What they will do and what American should have done is build the additional fee into the price of the ticket. That move would have been far more palatable with the public. I'm unsure what type of PR advise American was given or whether they decided to decline it; now, their efforts to find new ways to boost revenues may have backfired. It will be interesting to see if they reverse their decision and how it takes them.