crisis communication Archives

How do you apologise when you’ve made a serious mistake? I wrote about how brands can actually be more successful by admitting imperfections and mistakes last week – and tonight I happened to read a jaw-dropping example of a mistake by a newspaper (via Newspaper Death Watch).

The summary is the photo of an innocent 40-year-old man named Angel Ortiz was used in a front page story about a horrific crime committed by a 20-year-old with the same, and apparently very common, Spanish name. As a result, the innocent party has lost work, been persecuted and is effectively reduced to hiding in his house in fear of what might happen in public.

I’m sure that noone involved in publishing the story ever intended this to happen, but when a lawyer for the innocent Ortiz wrote to the paper demanding a front page retraction, the newspaper responded by removing the image from its website, and the ‘retraction ran on the bottom of page 2, with no photo‘.

Why apologies are business-critical:

I understand that sometimes the ‘right’ thing to do can run into roadblocks when lawyers advise on the ‘correct legal’ thing to do. But certainly retractions need to be an equal size and prominence to the original content, and reach the same audience.

Secondly, there’s been no personal apology, or any help and assistance in correcting the situation, which would have gone some way to rectifying the situation. I’m trying to think of any legal reasons why the paper couldn’t have run something asking for help in finding work for an innocent man, for example, besides their own guilt?

But here’s the thing – I don’t know the newspaper or any of the parties involved, and I’m located halfway around the world, but I’ll now associated the MetroWest Daily with this debacle. I’ve now also written about it to you, and shared it via Twitter etc. Besides my personal feelings about whether I’ll ever read or do business with the company, some quick google searches for relevant terms shows a number of sites picking up on the screwup, and nothing on the newspaper website offering any explanation or apology to make me think any better of them.

What they should be doing:

Anyone using a search engine for related terms will see coverage of this horrendous mistake. What the paper should have done is looked at how this error happened (and how to prevent it in the future), and then published a full apology in print and online which explains how they’ll avoid making such a disaster in the future. A human response would at least appear online and in search to provide some mitigation.

They should then have followed that up with a decent effort to try to rectify things (along with a personal apology), perhaps by running follow-ups to help Ortiz find work – again, this would show that despite the mistake, there are decent human people working at the newspaper, as well as that evidence appearing in search and social networks.

It’s how you handle mistakes that matters:

Errors have always happened, even if they seem more and more likely due to widespread editorial cuts around the world. But whereas the outcry even 15 years ago would have been barely noticeable in another country, the internet means that everything is catalogued and saved for all eternity.

If you understand that any mistake is extremely likely to be publicly indexed, then you understand that the response is key. And that response is going to be seen around the world, for as long as we have an internet, so responding ethically is more important than any other consideration.

And if you’re publishing or re-publishing any image online, double-check and triple-check the source, the content and the licensing restrictions.

Content is an amazing way of building up a business, but there are certain requirements you need to meet for it to be successful. I wrote a while ago about the time it can take to build up a content site organically, and a key part of that is adding content on a regular and consistent basis.

The good news is that your competitors are handing you a massive advantage every day, week, month or even year that they leave their website dormant, particularly when it comes to news sections and blogs.

And in an emergency or crisis, the days of being able to keep quiet until an official statement can be prepared are pretty much gone. You really need to have a crisis communications plan in place right now – you’ll understand why if something goes wrong without it, and the option of waiting for an official statement to calm everything down has gone the same way as the daily news cycle. Even if your staff can’t give out full details and solutions, they should be trained and prepared to acknowledge events and provide whatever assistance and information they can.

Obviously there have already been a number of examples, such as Eurostar, but technology companies are no better. Take for instance, the recent New York Times article covering the ‘secrets of search’ which led to JC Penney dominating Google results for lots of top product purchases in what appears to be the largest example of linkbuying and other ‘black hat’ practices.

The bottom of the second page reveals that JC Penney has terminated its search engine consulting, SearchDex.

‘PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.’

So someone at the firm is theoretically aware that the NYT is doing a story on the events surrounding JC Penney, and that article was published on February 12th, 2011.

So when you visit the news section of the SearchDex website on February 15th, 2011, you might do a double take –

The latest news on the SearchDex website three days after the NYT published the JCPenney story online is the March 15, 2007 announcement that JCPenney has signed for a ‘an unprecedented 4th year of service’ – and goes on to say ‘JCPenney has trusted SearchDex to handle all of their organic search marketing efforts’.

That’s 4 years ago, and 3 days after a huge news story concerning the brand, with anyone involved in the search business taking a look. Just scroll down the first page of Google results for SearchDex and see what you find… #5, #7, #8 and #9 are discussing what is going on, and one of them is Doug Pierce, who shares all the data that uncovered what SearchDex was doing.

If SearchDex did decide to update their news, there are a number of routes they could take. They could deny all knowledge, blame a scapegoat, or debate the data.

Alternatively, and here’s where I’d really like your views, they could take a different tack. They could come clean and admit everything, perhaps referencing how competitive search rankings can be, the fact that they may have known they were being dishonest, but that digital marketing companies are often under pressure to deliver results and using dishonest tactics are hugely tempting. If that was followed by future transparency, would that alter your opinions of the company, in comparison to your views after reading the NYT piece?

Apologise like everyone is watching…

Why apologies are business-critical:

What they should be doing:

It’s how you handle mistakes that matters:

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