SBellPR

To some, this headline may be a “no duh” moment. But, just the other day I heard someone say it. After the stunned feeling wore off, my thought was “Whoa! Maybe, it’s time we back up and cover some ground.” Additionally, I still see instances every day of companies that haven’t caught on yet. Everyday, I run into cases of bad service, shoddy products and “like it or lump it” mentalities. And, for this reason I know there are still many, many companies out there that don’t know the score — that don’t know that the customer is now 100 percent in the driver’s seat and that the power of the Internet makes their reach exponential.

We’ve reached a Darwinian moment in time in which the corporate landscape has dramatically shifted in just a few short years. Let me talk through where we came from to where we are now.

When I first got into PR, everyone, not just practitioners, knew that virtually “all press is good press.” With the exception of really, really Exxon Valdez-ish sort of bad news, we knew that most mentions of a company would be remembered as just that a few weeks out, a mention. People would recall that they heard something about company X, but usually wouldn’t remember if it was good or bad. With traditional print and broadcast media, things came and passed, clearing through our consciousness like a passing cloud. Mind you, I’m not speaking of OJ Simpson-type news which could slice through the clutter of our memories and stick like a bloody glove.

Now, let’s take an OJ-style leap from his trial in 1995 to 2005, when Jeff Jarvis, a single blogger, publicly lamented about poor service he had received from Dell, coining the term “Dell Hell.”  The term resonated with the online community and caught fire on the Internet, resulting in irreparable damage and millions of dollars spent by Dell to shore up their customer service. The result has had some good results for the company. It brought back Michael Dell to the helm and the company now has a strong social media presence. Yet, the term ‘Dell Hell’ still lingers on the net. I just googled it and got more than 30,000 results with the term in quotes and more than 1.3 million without using quotes. As I saw wisely put on Twitter the other day, “Social media is like a tattoo; it can fade, but it’s still always kind of there.”

Jumping closer to date, Dominoes is still reeling from Internet backlash of the two idiot employees who in April of this year filmed disgusting acts with food in a store’s kitchen then posted it to YouTube. Even though the video was taken down quickly, over a million people viewed the video in a matter of several days. Because many people downloaded the video, it can still be found. And, social media-bad press is the yicky fruitcake that keeps re-gifting for Motrin. They still have a headache over an ill-conceived “Motrin Moms” campaign that did not resonate well at all with many mothers.  And, of course, we can’t leave out the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ video that screamed through Twitter and arouund the Web last week. This video says it all:

Back in the early 90′s, I was aware of a printing company that consistently missed deadlines, up charged clients to death and basically delivered poor quality work when mistakes were made and deemed ‘too costly’ to fix.  I use to marvel at how in the world they had stayed in business for so long, 20+ years.  The reason is, back then, we – the consumer – felt too insignificant to do anything, and frivolous law suits over subpar service or quality issues seemed too big a hassle. So, we mostly took our lumps and went on. We didn’t have a social media network with which to share our laments and unite. We do now.

Long story short, ‘All press is good press’ no longer holds what so ever. You can experience a social media flash fire that can do worlds of hurt to your brand. The Internet has a memory and it is where we all reside. Now is the time to become better than you’ve ever been before and for all the right reasons. Here are some things you can do to prepare:

1.) Board of Directors, if you have a CEO who does shady things, let him/her go and replace them with someone of high integrity.  I was talking with the founder of Pizza Patrón the other day who said, “I would never do anything shady in front of my employees, because they would then think it is okay to do likewise.”  There’s a trickle down effect. Your troops take their signals from the top line. Make sure yours is all about delivering value to your customers.

2.) Monitor what is being said about your brand on the Internet. This is easy to do with a number of tools. Some good ones are Google Alerts or Blogpulse, and I love checking Addictomatic each day to see what is being said about the clients we represent. It gives a quick snapshot of the Internet.

3.) Have a crisis management plan in place to deal with anything and everything under the sun.

4.) Be proactive and reach out to your audiences through social media.

And, good press to all…