One thing that stuck out to me in this week's reading of Measuring What Matters Paine talked about keeping a good relationship with your local community. As Paine said "Communities with which you have good relationships can defend you in crisis." With that she used the example of when the killer whale killed the trainer the at SeaWorld, PETA attempted a "Free the Whales" campaign on FaceBook against SeaWorld. However, thankfully for SeaWorld they established a solid relationship with their customers and their Facebook community so the campaign wasn't successful.
This reminded me of many personal situations. One specifically was my when I got in my first school fight in fourth grade. I didn't do too bad in the fight, and by that I mean I won by a land slide, and was had to meet with the Vice Principle with the other kid the next day. Before the meeting, a couple of people were pretty "anti-Darnell" wanting me to get the suspension, even though the fight wasn't my fault. But, just like in PR, in real life you will hit crisis and the unexpected. However, I had a SeaWorld moment of my own, and thanks to my good reputation with the teachers and the majority of my peers I walked away clean and the other kid got the suspension.
If you do what your job correctly such as respond to your customers and community in real-time, keep them up to date, and deal with crisis in a swift and professional fashion you'll build a good relationship and reputation with them. That's how they can help you in crisis, if one person has an issue with you and tries to bring negative PR to your company, your community can come to your aid and it'll backfire on the one rebel. I think that is one of the most important things to take from this chapter.
I talked a little bit about this in my blog this week too. PETA comes down hard and fast on any company who's actions contradict their values. They're a powerful interest group and it's interesting to see where SeaWorld stands in all of it.
ReplyDeleteI'm also happy you won your grade school fight and were not suspended.
I really like the parallel you drew here. It's simple, but it really does seem to explain the principle well. The situation with SeaWorld is definitely an interesting one. PETA takes up a lot of causes without much regard for what chance they really have at success, so it's no surprise they were mistaken.
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