8 Crisis Management Tips for your business learnt from the #Wayfairgate conspiracy theory.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I'm your host. And this is a podcast for business owners who'd like to unlock the value in their business through effective and profitable public relations. Today, I'm going to talk about why crisis management is like having a fire extinguisher ready at all times for your brand. Now, crisis management is something that's been in the news Because of Wayfairgate. Now, for those of you that are not familiar with it, Wayfair is the online shopping portal started in Boston back in 2002, and the platform has some 14 million items on offer from 11,000 global suppliers. It's a listed company with a great market cap, and I'm going to talk about the impact of a crisis on their stock performance. Now, the issue with crisis management for anyone that's running a big company, or for the public relations company involved in helping to manage those situations, is that by definition we don't know when they're going to happen or what they're going to look like. So the real key with crisis management preparedness is being organized. So what I do, and when I've worked with clients on crisis management, is we have a checklist of 8 different things that we make sure that they do. And I'm going to explain what those 8 are, and they're going to be a list for you. If you're interested in getting your company prepared in case of having an incident like Wayfairgate, then you would be ready. Now, if you haven't heard, I'll just perhaps give you some background to this. There was a conspiracy theory that was spread last year originally through a Reddit sub-account. Reddit is sort of a kind of a general notice board where people can post information. R-E-D-D-I-T. And notable because the founder of Reddit married one of the Williams sisters. Venus Williams, of course. Now, on Reddit, the story was that Wayfair had been trafficking children through storage cabinets because this person had noticed several of the products were extremely overpriced, quote unquote, and these cabinets cost some $13,000. And that wouldn't have been enough, but that these cabinets had names like Samia and Yaretza. And so the theory was that these cabinets were actually the names of children that were being sold into slavery and other nasty things like that. Now, the, the very speculation seems to have been amazing in itself, but that it became such a large social media sensation is a testament to a couple of things. Now, I've talked before about the, uh, the Watts and the cascade theory, about how what we're looking for in viral stories is somebody that's easily influenced to absorb information and be willing to share that. And they do that because they've crossed over a particular threshold in their own mind that leads them to want to share that information. Now it seems that what has happened is that in America— this is of course— that there are some influencers, for example like Rebecca Pfeiffer, who has a fashion and home decor blog. She has 110,000 followers and she had put 9 different references to these conspiracy theories on her website. And a lady called Indy Blue Sevilla, who has 332,000 followers, said that the, the reply from the Wayfair spokespeople was very dismissive and surface-level statement, which was absolutely insufficient. Now, the, the slightly alarming thing here is that these social media gurus, influencers in America had been reposting these conspiracy theories. And in words of one of them, they felt that, you know, it could be true, and therefore they had shared it because they thought that, you know, human trafficking, child trafficking was in itself a dangerous thing. And the logic of someone charging that much for a piece of furniture And having the names of children was evidence enough that this was something. Now, that being actually on my iPad was a Wayfair notification. How about that? They're even here with me in my office, and I guess that's why I found it such an interesting story. Now, the Wayfair spokesperson, a presumably fairly stressed lady called Suzanne. Uh, or Susan Frechette had said in their statement that the products in question are industrial-grade cabinets that are accurately priced, and they recognize that the photos and the descriptions provided by the supplier did not accurately explain the high price point. So we temporarily removed the products from the site to rename them and provide a more in-depth description. Photographs that accurately depict the product to clarify the price point. Now, this, in my view and in the view of many people, was a fairly clear and definite statement. And so one of the really first rules of crisis management is to accept that something has been said, but not in any way to embrace nor endorse it. So their response was a good one in that it was explanatory, it was affirmative, and what it also did was to explain the corrective action. So it recognizes that there was enough cause for someone to want to write about this or to speak about it, and it explained the nature of why these cabinets were considered to be I guess sort of vehicles or coffins for people to be trafficked in. But it also took control of the situation by saying, we don't agree. These are not anything other than accurately priced but ill-described products. Now, this, this then still wasn't enough. I've mentioned what Blue Severe said. She thought it was dismissive and surface level. Emily Heron, who has Twitter @ChampagneAndChanel, posted a poll asking her audience of 1 million followers what they thought of Wayfair stuff. Or she said this Wayfair stuff, referring to the scandal. And 65% of her followers said that they believed the conspiracy theory. Now that's pretty phenomenal, both that an individual would have a million followers. Of course, that's, you know, a huge number of people. But also there's that level of, if you like, information and disinformation taking place in the marketplace. And one could argue, of course, that maybe her followers would perhaps be more, um, of the ilk that, that might believe in this whole deep state theory that, that's unfortunately been, uh, perpetrated in America. Now, interesting enough though, the whole sort of conspiracy theory then morphed into a Black Lives Matter, where somebody then said that the, the Wayfair issue was also a Black Lives Matter issue, um, because a large percentage of the 23,500 children who were classified as endangered runaways in America last year are children of color. So there's this sort of story on story taking place, and there's a website. And if you look on for Wayfairgate, you'll find just a huge number of websites, including one called Stillness in the Storm, which says deep state fact-checkers can't debunk Wayfairgate. Is Wayfair really trafficking humans? Now what's interesting about this is, of course, it's asking a question The rest of the article, which I've read, it doesn't say anything of the sort. But it's the sort of question that when we're doing media training, we warn our clients to be aware of. It is setting a statement for somebody else to address, but because the statement is fundamentally incorrect and inflammatory, it's extremely difficult for a spokesperson to get around that. And we talk about in our media training program about how to bridge, and bridging is to go from one person's question to where you would like to bring them for your key message. So it's interesting that this whole social media ecosystem in America and worldwide is starting to surf, and of course we had this with Brexit as well in the UK. And it's partly because when someone says something like this, it's inflammatory but also unproven. It starts to trend, and some of these social media influencers then repost these articles and these these infographics and these memes because they're trending. So you know, they're sort of hopping on a bus because it's going faster and faster without really asking. Where the bus is going to, or even if they got on the right bus. So we have to be careful of that. Now, when we do our media training and our crisis management, we talk about a number of different tools. I mentioned there are 8. So I've mentioned about the need first of all to give an affirmative but definitive statement to demonstrate being in control. What we also do when we work with clients is we ensure that they have a number of things prepared. Number one is that you have a list of all the key spokespeople for each occasion, because different occasions will warrant a different spokesperson. For example, if it's a technical crisis, you might have the, the CTO. If it's a commercial question, you might have the CFO. If it's a healthcare You might have whoever is taking care of health. In other words, it's not always the CEO who needs to come out and speak. And the reason for this is because it's a good idea to have a definition of what are different priorities of crises. So some are life-threatening to the business and everybody around the business, but some are not life-threatening and some are not, if you like, code red. And to always wheel out the CEO whenever there's a crisis can, if you like, bring a mismatch between the spokesperson and the issue. It also means that there is less opportunity to escalate in case the crisis grows. So I always like to recommend that you have a number of people who are all prepared to speak on different topics, and as a result, you have spokespeople photographs ready, an archive of them, but also had those speak— those spokespeople's photographs in different situations. So in other words, we might have spokespeople looking serious and earnest as a set. We might have spokespeople looking happy and relaxed. We might have them in front of people. We might have them with a suit on and a suit off. Because, you know, in the same way that if a child gets hurt We would address that differently if they got hurt at home, to if there's a crisis at school and the child isn't hurt, but there's a place where the child is in a crisis. So we need to have different materials ready for different kinds of crises. What we also then do is to look at the kind of messages that we have. For the different crises. Now, when I work with clients, and I work with a very large consumer appliances company in Singapore on crisis management, and the issue was that large televisions were getting too heavy for some of the cabinetry that they're being placed on, it, it was creating a potential risk and liability in case, for example, children were watching the television and the furniture couldn't withstand the weight. And, and I won't go into obviously the scenarios here, but we mapped out the different kind of scenarios and the different people would speak and the time frame at which we would issue different kinds of information. So it's good to have a holding statement ready that within hours of a, of a crisis being announced, which just states that you recognize that there is a crisis It's a bit like shouting out to the child, yep, hold on, I see you've fallen off your bike. I know that's an issue. Wait for me, I'm coming. Okay, it's not saying, I know what I'm going to do right now about your injury, but it is recognizing that there's been an accident of some kind. And then different levels of statements, but they're all around business continuity. Crisis management Ultimately is all about business continuity. So messages around how you're going to resolve the crisis, take stock, create workarounds, solutions, replacements, whatever the solution is going to be. And then what does the future look like after the crisis? So is that a future where the same facility is open again, but it now it's been being cleansed or replaced in some way, equipment replaced, or is it, it's an entire relocation, for example. So I worked with one company that found that they had, under a former management, buried a large amount of materials under the ground, and, and the new management were faced with toxic waste basically coming to light because the fumes started to come through the ground. Were making people sick. So it wasn't something that anyone could have imagined, but actually it was because the history of that building meant that there had been manufacturing there for nearly 20 years. And so one of the scenarios would be pollution. So when we work with a client, and if you work with your team, blue sky, or if you like, red sky, all the things that could go wrong with your company, whether it's people issues, customer issues, facility issues, product issues. Think of those scenarios and write down, this is what happens, these would be our remedies, these would be the people who'd speak to those points, these would be the photographs, and these would be the timelines. We'd have a holding statement, we would have then a call, for example, to a media briefing, or or if that's not possible, to one-on-one interviews or a group interview through Zoom, for example. So the next item, and I'll put all of these in the show notes, is to monitor for trends. Now, what we obviously had in the case of this Wayfair gate is that some of these social media surfers were basically jumping on a wave And actually, it was sewage, not crystal clear water they were jumping onto when they were surfing. But they were just concerned they were on a wave. So what we need to do is to still monitor and use tools like Talkwalker, for example, or Scission or Meltwater to track, to track what's being said where and how. Now, a quick look at the stock price of Wayfair shows that in April it was $96, and today It's $226. So plainly, this hasn't hurt the company. So the question is, why is this company being targeted? Is it short sellers? Do you think that a bit like the ones that have been speculating on Elon Musk's fortune at Tesla, or is it something more fundamental? Back earlier in the year, there was a staff walkout. Because the company had sold $200,000 of furniture to the ICE, the facilities which detain people at the American borders, ironically enough. So it's a company also that when a reporter from Boston wrote about them argued that their original sin is the genesis of the company and that it is basically a digital platform that doesn't produce anything and really is just like an Amazon of furniture, but that the company actually didn't even think of its own name, that it actually outsourced that to a marketing agency. So what's interesting there is that perhaps the best defense in a crisis management situation is the authenticity of the brand. So there will be many people, or some people who will leverage the internet to try and bring down a brand. But I've tried to explain a number of different tools and methods that you can implement now, that if your company does experience a crisis, you'll be prepared. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If there's anything in here that I can help you with, please do reach out. I'm jim@eastwestpr.com. You can also come to our website, which is eastwestpr.com, and see This podcast and our Speak PR methodologies all available and download for free at our website. So in the meantime, I wish you the best of health and a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating and be prepared for any crisis that might arise.