In the glitch heard round the world, Amazon.com is this week paying for its poorly handled cataloging error that marked all 57,310 gay and lesbian books as “adult content,” thereby excluding the authors from their rightful place on the site’s lucrative sales rankings. This set off your worst-nightmare-crisis-communication scenario and in its wake is an important reminder of some essential PR lessons.
1. Tell it all and tell it fast.
This is my hands-down favorite and truly the first commandment of crisis communication. It’s the first commandment and Amazon.com didn’t do it. They released this wish-washy statement late Sunday instead:
“We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed. We’re working to correct the problem as quickly as possible.”
It doesn’t tell us what happened, doesn’t tell us it’s a priority to get fixed and it doesn’t show any empathy to the community it offended with the censorship error. If anything the statement just inspired greater anger, which has dominated the Web and the Twitterverse for the last two days. That brings me to point number two.
2. When you do something wrong, expect your customers to tell you - in force.
As if this technical glitch wasn’t enough of a challenge to fix, now Amazon had a full-fledged crisis on their hands. Thousands of Twitter users began tagging their posts with #amazonfail, making it one of the most popular searches on Twitter. In addition, some of the affected authors started a boycott petition online that has at this time attracted more than 22,000 signatures. In today’s online environment, you can barely afford to make such a mistake, let alone not be held accountable for it. This makes your initial statement ever more important.
3. Squash conspiracy theories.
By letting the Web run rampant with conspiracy theories, you are essentially prolonging the story and keeping it front and center in the news. Face the conspiracy theories head on. In this case, a hacker tried to get publicity take credit for the error. That is why it is so important to try to be as detailed as you can in your statement and answer any questions you expect up front, before they are asked of you. Otherwise you will have every disgruntled employee and competitor try to take control of the story from you.
Photo by: bronwynmaye
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