259: Crisis Communication Strategies with Aliza Licht

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

You believe in something. It is your statement. You stand by it. If you have asked yourself why am I posting this? And you're like no, you know what, I know about this subject. I am knowledgeable. This is my cause, I'm going to say it and people don't like it. You can take the position of you know what, let everyone fight in the comments and I'm going to stay silent and this is going to blow over. And that is also a strategy.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back Free Timers. I'm so excited to bring you a very special guest today, Eliza Licht. Eliza is an award winning marketer, best selling author, podcaster, branding expert and the founder of Leave youe Mark, a multimedia brand and consultancy. She leverages over two decades of experience in marketing, communications and digital strategy in the fashion industry. She became uber popular when she created the anonymous social media phenomenon DKNYPR Girl, which was probably one of those early anonymous accounts. Like I could just totally see that taking off. And her newest book is called On Brand Shape your Narrative, Share youe Vision, Shift Their Perception. Liza, welcome to the show.

Jenny, thank you so much for having me. I love your show.

Thank you. Well, likewise. I was grateful to be a guest on yours. So we'll put that in the show notes.

I loved having you.

Thank you. I'll leave your mark. See that's the thing about podcasting. It's just such a good way to make friends.

Totally.

I asked you what topic might be relevant for small business owners and when you suggested crisis communications, I had this flutter of excitement because it's not something we've ever talked about on the show in over 250 episodes and yet the world seems to be increasingly like a giant dumpster fire, especially heading into an election year. So can we start by you defining what is crisis communications and tell us a little bit about your background and having to navigate that world?

First of all, everyone has to understand as they're building brands and they're building their businesses, the more awareness they have on what they're doing, the higher the risk. My background is actually in public relations, and I spent many, many years working in fashion and doing sort of the traditional PR role, which was of course, to cultivate brand awareness. But sometimes you just have a misstep or, or you misjudge or you don't think about something and it backfires. So learning how to control the narrative when that happens is really what crisis communications is all about. So in my book on brand, I'm teaching people how to build their personal brands or build their small business brands. But at the same time, I need to arm people with the education and information about what happens when you mess up. And I would say that before we talk about crisis comms, I think we have to talk about brand guardrails, because every single business needs to understand one the world has changed. We expect founders and business owners to have a point of view, but the question is, what kind of point of view? Where do you begin? Where do you end? What things will you talk about? What things won't you talk about? What things will you stand behind? What won't you? And doing those exercises, which I call mental gymnastics exercises in on brand is how you figure out what your guardrails are.

There's been a lot of talk recently in a way of kind of take fatigue, where people feel like they're expected to have a take on everything. And then I often feel that there's a certain party line that you're supposed to have, and if you don't, it's like, just get ready to be pilloried or canceled. How does a business owner navigate creating these guardrails? And for me, with my newsletters, they're about business and career change. And I didn't really want to address global events in the introduction because I always felt like I'd be selecting certain tragedies and not others, or it would be a never ending list, or, I don't know, I made a decision to not speak to that and kind of stick to my subject matter. But then at the same time, you'll hear an adage like, silence is violence. If you don't say anything, it's your privilege not to. And it's just as wrong as to have taken the wrong side or something. So it just feels incredibly fraught in every direction. How do you recommend people think about this, of what is their point of view and settling in their own core, in their own integrity, of what they will and won't stand behind and when they will and won't be public about.

That, you hit the nail on the head, Jenny, because first we go back again to the guardrails. So in on brand, I give you like a Venn diagram exercise to figure out what your content buckets are, what you believe in, what you want to stand behind. And if something is authentic to you, you have a cause that you deeply believe in and it is part of who you are as a human. You may decide, you know what, this is so important to me that this is going to be a part of my business communication. Or you may say, you know what, I don't know a lot about these subjects. I don't want to get involved. And you take the path of I'm going to be silent. The key is consistency. If you never speak about anything in your newsletter, then don't speak about anything in your newsletter. However, in times of world crisis, when you know that the entire world is talking about a subject, the best thing to do is just to not publish. Because then what happens is you can just be looked at as like, tone deaf. If you don't want to say anything and there's like, the world is on fire, then just like go dark for a little while.

I know exactly what you mean. And it happens to me with the podcasts because sometimes I'll be a month ahead, sometimes three months ahead, and I will have recorded a conversation months prior. It gets scheduled to go out a month into the future. And then, okay, some sudden thing strikes down, strikes the world, and the episodes keep going live. And one time I did pause, another time I just let them keep rolling. It's tricky, but people who are listening in the moment don't know that, oh, this was recorded three months ago and scheduled a month ago.

You know, they're exactly in on Brand, I take you through how to build a content strategy and for personal brands and for small business, what it means to have a content strategy. And I am personally very against scheduling any type of posts for that exact reason because you will forget about it and it will go off at a time that maybe is not the right time. And then maybe your business will basically be attacked because of that. And it's sort of like just an easy thing you can avoid by really making sure that you Are clear on maybe what is scheduled and just doing a quick pulse check with yourself, like the day before, oh, wait, my episode's coming out tomorrow. Or my email for this sale is coming out tomorrow. Like, is that still okay? Should we pause that communication? Like that is the thought process that people need to have.

So then when it comes to crisis comms more broadly, my impression is that from a PR perspective, something goes haywire. The brand makes the wrong move or they've upset their community. Correct me if I'm wrong on how you define crisis communications. I would just love if you could take us to a moment even earlier in your career where you learned this lesson the hard way. Like, feet in the fire. Had to figure it out as you went.

Oh, my God.

First of all, I would say crisis communications is something that should be planned for before you have a crisis. The team involved with a crisis plan, maybe your lawyer, maybe if you have a bigger business, you have an HR person, or maybe you have your head of marketing, your head of pr, or maybe you're by yourself, but you know, you have certain friends who are savvy in this area putting that sort of bat team together. It's almost like you're to go bag in an emergency, you know who they are. Because when crisis happens and all of a sudden your name is everywhere, your brand is everywhere, and in the worst possible way, you're not going to be thinking clearly and you're not going to really be cognizant to understand, like, oh, my God, like, who can I call right now in this minute? So identifying who those key people are to help you navigate is important. I will also say that in the world of social media right now, the platforms are very siloed. So I always advise businesses and people, if a fire starts on one platform, your initial reaction might be, oh, my God, oh my God, I need to apologize and I need to just post this everywhere. But what you're doing when you do that is, is you're spreading your own wildfire. Just because something happens on Instagram doesn't mean Facebook knows about it, doesn't mean Twitter knows about it. So try to think about containing a fire where it has started. Now, obviously, if you're like a huge brand, that's going to be harder. It's going to spread. But for small business, you can put out individual fires. And crisis communication starts with one, understanding where you messed up. What did you do that has now pissed off your community? Two, how quickly can you respond to that? Because the clock does start ticking. And three, are There actions you need to take in addition to your words of apology that are going to make this more sincere. Because, Johnny, the American pastime is picking apart apologies and deciding if they meant it or. Or not. Right? Seriously, Years ago at dkny, I was the SVP of global communications. We were going to work with, or I tried to work with a photographer, Humans of New York, who's very, very famous. We had a lunch and I asked him to do this campaign for us, and he was like, oh, that sounds great. He sent me an email the next day. The quote was way too high, way beyond our budget. I said, oh, my God, you know, I would love to work with you, but, like, unfortunately, we can't afford this creative departments. And this is really important for small businesses because when you have teams of people who are making your creative assets for social media or for emails or for any type of advertising and marketing, sometimes creatives will do what's called fpo, which means for position only. So, meaning this is not the real ad, this is not the real image, this is not the real graphic, but it's a placeholder for what will come. And FPO is a really important watermark to put on something that is a draft. So our creative team mocked up what the windows would look like with this photographer's images as an fpo. The art director didn't write FPO on the image and, and sent it around as an example for what the windows could look like if we were working with him. And a store in Bangkok, DKNY store in Bangkok actually printed this vinyl and put it up in the windows. And lo and behold, Humans of New York has a friend who happened to be in Bangkok walking by and texted him and said, dude, your stuff looks amazing in the windows of dkny. And he was like, I didn't do that campaign. So instead of contacting me, the person he had lunch with, he decided to go on his Facebook page of half a million followers and basically say that we stole his images. Oh, no. And when you have a very active fan base, like real, real fans, they're rabid. They're rabid. And they went after us. And he basically blackmailed us and. And he asked for a hundred thousand dollars donation, which was his fee that he had quoted me that I said we couldn't afford to donate to the YMCA cause that he is active in. And it became this horrible Twitter situation. Now, you referenced DQIPR girl in the beginning of our conversation. So I was at the front lines of this with people literally sending me death Threats over this. And I had to very, very quickly start diffusing and explaining what had happened. And I really went. And, of course, consulting other people internally. But we really went with the real story like it was a mistake. It was a mistake. And we ended up making a $25,000 donation to the YMCA. But the learnings of that were. God, our bat team needs to be assembled way before we have a crisis, because we didn't have it assembled at the time. And we were really, really flustered and also trying to move quickly, but you can't move quickly when you need to involve legal and PR and marketing and the people team. And it was just a hot mess. But we ended up taking negative sentiment down from, like, I don't know, 98% negative for the brand to 48% within 24 hours, which was a huge improvement. It eventually went away, but that was my learning.

Oh, my goodness. I have so many questions. First, if we. I'll put the negative sentiment article in the show notes. What was the brand that it was for again?

Dkny.

Oh, it was for dkny. Okay.

Oh.

First of all, before I get to one of my tactical questions, how are you feeling in that moment? Because I would imagine that almost our survival instincts kick in, and you would just be so flooded with adrenaline and mixed feelings of, like, guilt, defensiveness, frustration at his response. So just take us to the emotional journey of this time.

One thing is that when you're a business and you're launching, like, a marketing campaign or you are really doing any type of marketing, you need to do what's called social listening. Right? You need to not go offline and not have an idea of what your brand status is at any given time. Right? So bigger companies do have tech tools for social listening. Because I was on Twitter literally 24 hours a day, and I had a second screen at my desk to track the conversations that were happening on and around our brand. I caught this very quickly. I literally wanted to die. I was so upset. One, because he knew how to contact me, and he could have just emailed me or texted me and said, hey, you literally said you couldn't do this. And how is this in the window? Like, you need to pay me. And we would have been able to figure it out directly, but he went just really, really just public and aggressive. It was such an attack on not just the brand, but also me personally. I mean, I was panic stricken, Jenny. I didn't know what to do first. But I did know that because his fans were so rabid, we needed to move really, really quickly. And a lot of times when you have an infrastructure or a bigger brand, things move really slowly. Really lighting the fire underneath teammates to make sure, like get everyone on the phone right now. We need to make a decision. How are we handling this? What is the apology? Making sure the language is correct, making sure we're clear on what we're doing as far as the action. Right, the actions, the donation. I mean, it was horrible. I mean, I still have PTSD from it. I'm not kidding.

How does that show up? This feeling, how it lingers with you? Is it a fear that's going to happen again? Like, how do you deal with that in the long term?

I think it shows up as a very cautious, mindful thought process. When I'm launching anything, I really think through what I always visualize is like the pebble in the pond, right? You toss a pebble into a pond and like the ripple effect of one tiny pebble, you toss it in. What is going to happen next? So just going five to 10 steps ahead of any type of marketing message and playing out the scenarios is really essential for any single business to think through.

We'll be right back just after this. Cuando entras a Burlington Encuentras precios increibles irregal los geniales jeso es energia del.

Protagonista por que Burlington, Los Angeles.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

One thing that this story brings up and thank you so much for sharing it with us, what you've learned is that the other party and or even the mob quote unquote online in the socials is not always a hundred percent in the right either. And it seems like it would be tempting to just have the whole house on fire and go, oh my God, whatever you want, whatever you want me to say. However, I need to apologize and make amends. And yet I've seen situations where the mob or whoever it is literally posting on social demanding almost a ransom payment.

This was, this was.

And they'll put it publicly on Instagram. If you do not wire X amount of dollars to my PayPal by tomorrow, I will release all of our emails. And it seems to get so escalated to put it one way and then also just because the mob wants a certain course of action does not mean that that's necessarily the right one to take. But it feels almost impossible to stand up against that because the mob is a very powerful thing. And I know I keep saying the mob, but we've all seen this happen. We've all seen swarms where people just pick the person that they want to absolutely take down. There's like even YouTube videos about this. But it kind of like takes on a momentum of its own. There's like herd mentality. It gets oftentimes really blown in a way, blown out of proportion. So it seems difficult to toe your own line in the middle of a crisis and not kowtow completely if you know that the other person, like in this case, kind of jumping to conclusions or not necessarily approaching it the right way either, but they have all these people behind them.

Yes. That's why you can't give into the panic of it. Right. You have to have people that you can have logical, strategic conversations with to decide the right course of action.

It does seem like the people who are the most reactively apologetic sometimes get piled on even more. And then the people who say, and I hate to make gender stereotypes, but I've seen it play out where in a way, women seem to be, in general seem to be a little more immediately apologetic. And I think we are socialized this way and socialize more to people, please, than men. Where I see men say, don't you dare tell me what to do. I'm not lifting a finger in response to this. And then people kind of go away. They go off of it. So it's so wild to me witnessing that dynamic where the people who are trying the hardest or the most apologetic get piled on further. And then the ones that say, I'm not going to listen to this go away. It's like, I don't know, the masses kind of say, oh, we're not going to make any progress here. We'll keep moving.

Yeah.

Have you noticed that to be true as well?

I have. And I also think this crisis communications topic is extremely detailed and nuanced. And in on Brand, you know, I go through all of the steps and thought process of how you think about it, because even something as simple as saying, oh, no, you know what, I'm just going to delete that post. That itself, that action can make the situation even worse because we all know the screenshot is more powerful than the delete button. Right. So every single action you take from the moment you learn about a crisis needs to be Considered that reminds me.

Of the Barbra Streisand effect. Have you heard of this?

What is it? Remind me.

One time she demanded there was an article or something. I'll get the link. I'll put it in the show notes. I think that they had put photos of her house or something she did not want public. And so the bigger deal she made about getting this publication to take it down, the more press the whole situation got. And then essentially it got blown way farther out of proportion just from her making a big deal out of it. I'm not putting it very well. I'll have to look it up. But that sometimes for a reaction, there's a reaction. And that I find the deleting thing. I understand. Sometimes people are very angry and they feel like they've done a lot of work in the comments. How dare you delete this thing. But on some other level, don't we have the right not to have every single thing we've ever uttered, for better, for worse, available for consumption? Like Drew Barrymore had the thing where she did her apology after she was raking the writers strike. And then I think she deleted something. I forget which of her communications during that time she deleted. I wonder if you can kind of like Monday morning quarterback that one.

What we're seeing now, though, is people are putting out their apologies and turning off comments, which means that the comments are going to end up on the post prior to the apology post. But it is a way to mitigate the backlash. Because if you are a public figure and you are apologizing, it's going to get analyzed and judged. I mean, there's no way around it. That's part of the responsibility of being a public figure. You have to understand that comes with the territory. But I would say that again, the way people apologize matters. And if you remember like last year, I think it was Jenny, remember when Chief had that whole internal scandal of their members. Some of them decided to publicly say that they are leaving Chief for X amount of reasons. It was on LinkedIn. It started on LinkedIn and the founders decided to post an apology in the comments of the initial post because it had gone viral and they felt that they needed to. The words that they use, like, I read that and I was like, oh, God, who advised these people? It was just so poorly done. So you really need sounding boards. You need people who do this for a living to really help you craft the message. Because apologies are not created equal.

What made that one poorly done?

Probably, if I remember correctly, it just felt performative. It Just felt like we know where there's a scandal right now, so we're going to do our obligatory apology. Didn't feel sincere. I also think that when you include words like but or immediately start trying to point fingers towards something else as the culprit, people don't respond well to that.

What would make a good apology? On the other hand, going back to.

Even the comment about deleting a post, I think if somebody did something wrong and they were like, okay, you know what? I don't want this out there. I don't care if it's screenshot, but I want it down, I would probably say something like, I've read all your comments. I've decided to delete this post. This post does not reflect how I feel about X situation. I apologize for making people upset or feel a certain way. I mean, obviously I'm drafting this, like in my mind right now, but it has to be a very clear I apologize. A lot of apologies don't actually say those words. So now everyone who's listening, the next time you see a public apology, look at the words, look at the language. Because sometimes they don't actually say that they're sorry.

That's true. And then the but, well, okay, let me ask you this. What if they're not sorry? Maybe the reason they're not saying I apologize is that in their heart of hearts, they're not sorry. So then it seems like their customers and community have a choice to make. Do I want to stand behind this yes person? Right. Or this type of person?

Yes. If you authentically know that you stand behind again, going back to the brand guardrails, you believe in something, it is your statement. You stand by it. By the way, every time I post something in my own mind, I say to myself, why am I posting this? And is this within my own brand filters? Like, that is literally what I do and it is the best gut check ever. And I recommend every single person do it. So if you have asked yourself, why am I posting this? And you're like, no, you know what? I know about this subject. I am knowledgeable. This is my cause, I'm going to say it and people don't like it, you can take the position of, you know what, let everyone fight in the comments and I'm going to stay silent and this is going to blow over. And that is also a strategy.

What were your two questions again for every post?

Why am I posting this? And is this within my own personal brand guardrails or your own business guardrails? So the Venn diagram in On Brand. When you do that as an exercise, the joined middle circle is really where you understand what your content mix should be like. And then understanding, you know, there's an exercise in On Brand about like, what is your belief system? What is super important to you? What are things you want to talk about and you want to get behind? What are things that you don't and you want to let someone else talk about? Having that gut check to understand what that is is really, really important to this question.

Why am I posting this? Do you find on a day to day basis outside of a crisis, do you ever ask yourself that question and then you decide not to release something? Whether it's an article, something on social or even your podcast, is there ever an answer or I'm curious what types of answers to why am I posting this would yield you to keep it behind the scenes.

Two quick examples when On Brand came out. You've written books, you want as much press as possible, right? And that Saturday night my publicist texted me and she said, do you want to go on TV tonight to talk about the Budweiser scandal? And I did my mental gut check and I said, you know what? That topic is not in my run guard rails. Like that's not my topic. And I declined. And when you don't decline press when you launch a book, right? But I knew one. I am not familiar with Budweiser, I'm not a consumer of Budweiser. I don't know what their history is with the LGBTQ community. Like it was not my son subject matter. And I declined. That is really, really important. The other thing that's really important is when you say to yourself, why am I posting this? So in my regular content, sometimes when you're super active on social media or you feel like you need to post, sometimes something pops into your head and you're doing it not because you really believe in it, but you feel like you need to say something or you need to post something. So when I ask myself that question, sometimes I'll be like, you know what? I don't need to post this. You know what, it's fine not to post something. I don't believe in like obligatory posting. I believe in posting something. When you feel moved to post something.

Your story just now brings up an article I only just read. You're probably familiar and you've been in this world for such a long time. It's called the Journalist and the Murderer. It's from.

No, but I love it already. No, I know.

So this is a classic. It's Janet Malcolm for the New Yorker. I'll put the link in the show notes. 1989. Then they turned it into a book. She starts off, and the first sentence of it is famous. Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. And essentially it does tell the story of a journalist who got embedded with a murderer and the rollicking and then the lawsuits and the murderer paid him to write the book. But over the course of the writing, the journalist came to feel he was guilty. So then when the book came out, he had kind of deceived his subject. Oh, even just recently, I introduced a friend to be interviewed for an article and it would be such a damaging piece, reputationally the way that it came out, and she had to write to the person and try to correct the record. So I think turning down opportunities because we're often so excited, like, oh, this media outlet's calling. But you're not guaranteed to be shown in a good light. And I feel like only once you've been burned, and I have not been burned in a very serious way around this, knock on wood. It always surprised me, people who say, oh, I won't talk to reporters anymore, even if it's the New York Times calling or some other fancy publication, because the journalist is under no obligation to put you in a good light.

Yes. And to your point, in On Brand, I go through what if you do get emails from a reporter that wants to talk to you about something and the steps you need to take to consider that conversation and what it means to be on the record, what it means to go on background. Like all of those terms are really a contract that you have with the journalists. So for example, if you're going to start talking to a reporter and you don't say before you start talking off the record, everything is on the record, everything, including your mannerisms, what you're eating, what you're wearing, everything. So you do need to understand the rules of engagement. So I go through those in a really simple way. And on Brand, and I also have an expert in the book because I have a lot of experts in the book who is a very, very well known crisis communications person that works with very, very many famous executives and brands. She's actually anonymous in the book because she didn't want to be known as the person giving out all this secret intel. But there is so much to know about engaging with the press. So if you are someone that is interested in engaging with the press. I highly, highly recommend you really focus on this chapter because you can really, really mess yourself up if you don't know how to work with it.

It's not intuitive like what the article makes. The point is that we often feel so happy while we're talking to a reporter or with the media because we're like, the spotlight's on us. We're gonna have success for whatever project we're trying to get into the world. And we feel so good in the moment. And of course, the journalist's job is to make us feel good and get us to keep talking. Can be a fraught dynamic if you really know what's going on. So it's good to hear that you address that in your book.

I mean, they are after the story. They are not there to protect you. They're after protecting the story. And that is what everyone has to remember. And by the way, it's very easy to do some due diligence on someone to see like, hey, this reporter just contacted me. Let me look at their past work. Oh, wow. They really sold their subjects down the river. Like, you can see if someone's always really snarky or always sort of like a gotcha moment. Like, you have to understand who you're speaking to.

Last question, Eliza. Thank you for all this info. If you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I give every small business owner permission to think of themselves as a person, personal brand, in addition to the business they own.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Elisa. It's been great chatting with you. Thank you for sharing all your wisdom in this arena with us.

Oh, my God. Jenny, thanks for the great questions. It's such a great topic. Listen, it's hard. It's hard. These days are hard. Cancel culture is hard. In the book, I'm like, can we please cancel cancel culture? But right, we do all need to understand how to work within the confines of the the world we live in. So thank you so much for giving me the platform.

What a treat. And listeners, you can check out on Brand Wherever books are sold, as well as Eliza's podcast, Leave youe Mark. Thank you so much, Eliza. Thanks everybody for listening.

Thanks, Jenny. Thanks for listening, everyone.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful. And for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend. To run my business where no one works full time Even me, visit itsfreetime.com join Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

The Uniswap Wallet makes it easier and safer to own and use crypto Created by pioneers of the crypto economy, the Uniswap protocol has powered over $3 trillion in trading volume, and it's trusted by tens of millions worldwide. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can discover, swap, and manage your crypto all from your phone. Buy your first crypto assets in just a few taps and start exploring the freedom of decentralized finance. With Uniswap, Tap the banner to get.