[ On Wiener Dogs, Rats & Search ]

Dachshunds are a smart, compact breed of dog designed to seek out and dispatch their even smaller and smarter adversaries: rats. This February Yum Brands had a rat problem worthy of a whole herd of wiener dogs, in the form of television footage showing rodents run amok in a New York KFC/Taco Bell. When the video found its way online, anyone could search for it. And they did.

We normally think of our favorite search engine as a faithful tool, a trusty hound sniffing out the answers we need from the Net. But like any excitable breed, search might just turn around and bite you.

Which is the real public relations lesson from the Yum Brands rat incident. As Kate Macarthur points out in Advertising Age, while the firm did make its share of typical PR mistakes – a slow response, treatment of the story as purely local, inadequate statements on the brands’ websites – the mechanics of search morphed the crisis into a fiasco. When people searched for “rats” they got Taco Bell; when they searched for “KFC” they found links to exterminators.



To avoid being in the doghouse, here’s what to remember:
• The more people visit a site, the higher it climbs in the rankings. To give your firm’s message equal billing, you need viewers to visit the sites you point them to...because they’ll already be checking out your site of disaster. A media crisis is a marketing crisis, so be sure your crisis communication plan addresses all forms of communication. It’s vital to get your message right and your click rate up.
• Be mindful of the need to advertise against negative search terms. Unhappy combinations of search terms – like a company’s name and “rodents” – can bring up damning sponsored links. You can fend off such results by buying up the relevant terms. Yum Brands seems to have taken this advice – now such a search yields zero sponsored links, instead of a who’s who of exterminators. (Over-reliance on computer-generated advertising is also unwise, even downright ghoulish. Adrants notes that when Anna Nicole’s son died, IntelliTXT ads offered new Smiths for sale at Target.)
• On the Net, mistakes are global...and they linger. At time of writing, one of the top 10 results for a Google search of “Taco Bell” involves union boycotts, and the sponsored links reference E. coli and law firms specializing in food and drug cases. Steady PR and search monitoring are always needed to offset such messages.

On the Net, the complications from poor crisis management can breed like rats...and it takes dogged persistence to sort them all out.

Unless of course,the dog dies from eating tainted pet food.

Which is why, as Ad Age and Yahoo! News report, organic pet food producers are experiencing a bonanza in the wake of pet deaths from tainted brand-name products. After all, the whole point of search is that it lets people find you. So paid-search ads drove concerned consumers to natural and organic pet food providers, whose sales have skyrocketed. Menu Foods’ debacle is a godsend to these companies, who recognize an opportunity to reach a vast, suddenly interested audience.

Thus, while organizations need to anticipate and protect themselves against potential crises, they also need to be nimble and alert to new opportunities. Disasters may linger on the Web, but golden opportunities don’t. When a competitor stumbles, ask what marketing communications tools might be used to capitalize on the moment...including, of course, search optimization strategies.

When well trained, search can be man’s best friend. Don’t let a crisis be your organization’s obedience school.

[ On Disasters, Human Nature & Your Media Insurance Policy ]

The difference between a potential PR disaster and an actual one is typically the PR itself – or the lack of it, in 99 percent of all cases. Johnson & Johnson’s aggressive response to Tylenol tampering in 1982 set the industry standard for good crisis PR. But most companies in a similar situation, like Firestone, fail to live up to that standard: reacting slowly, hiding their heads in the sand, obfuscating, taking half-measures, or even lying.

Typically they do so with the best of intentions – they just want to minimize the bad news. But news always gets out, and the resulting fallout is often more disastrous than the original calamity. (Just ask Patricia Dunn, HP’s overly inquisitive former chairwoman.)

When this happens, it’s easy for the marketing communications world to opine. “If only they had done crisis communications planning!” we say. “If only they’d had media training!” “We could have helped them avoid all this!” And we shake our heads ruefully as we switch our Firestones for Goodyears.

What we overlook is the fact that it’s our fault these companies have no crisis communication plans. We’re offering something that nobody wants.

People are cocky. They don’t believe disaster will happen to them. They always believe they are the exception, that their luck will hold.

Take fires, for example. Do you check your smoke detector faithfully every six months? Is there a fire extinguisher on every floor? And does your family practice its escape plan? Be honest– the answer to at least one of these questions is probably “No.”

Or what about driving? Do you always maintain a following distance of one car-length per 10 MPH of speed, or do you occasionally tailgate? Do you always stop at yellow lights, or do you squeak through before the red?

“But my house won’t catch on fire,” we say. “I’m a good driver.” Firms do likewise: “The company’s books are fine.” “Of course we’re environmentally responsible.”

But wait – look again at the above examples. We may not have nine-volts for the smoke detector...but we do have fire insurance. We take chances in cars that we shouldn’t...but by law, we have to have a policy before we get behind the wheel.

If the potential cost is high enough (the loss of all we own in a fire, for instance) we take certain measures... not to protect ourselves, but rather to get other people to protect us. Essentially, that’s all insurance is. And why should businesses behave any different than people?

So let’s call crisis communication planning what it is: media insurance. Media insurance is the guarantee that, when the inevitable bad day happens, you will know what to say and how to say it. Media insurance is the promise that someone will be there to guide you through the thicket of reporters’ microphones. Media insurance is how you make the news, rather than become it.

In short, PR firms need to stop lamenting organizations’ reluctance to do adequate crisis communication planning, because what they are lamenting is human nature itself. Instead they need to invoke common sense: getting media insurance is simply the smart thing to do. It’s folly to get behind the wheel of a car without insurance. It’s folly magnified exponentially to do the same when you’re driving a company.

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