217: My Public Relations Strategy That Got Two Clients Out of Crises

Hey there everyone. Welcome to the podcast. This edition is going to be a little bit different. It comes by way of request from someone in my Patreon. If you haven't heard, I have created a Patreon account. It opened on the 1st of November. And if you're not familiar with Patreon, you may not be, but it is an external membership site if you will. A lot of people who have podcasts and TikTok accounts and social media presence or books or authors, you know, a lot of people who have information to share. A lot of storytellers on there will use Patreon as a place to create community but also to share more behind the scenes information. So if you want to check out my page, you can find it under Molly McPherson. I have to tell you, I really enjoy it. I'm someone who gives, I give a lot in all my content. I certainly do it every week on this podcast. I'm doing it more and more on TikTok, which is way stressful. I also have a email that goes out frequently that will be going out a lot more. I'm on social media in other places such as Twitter and Instagram. Instagram stories, which by the way, that is a place where a lot of my people reside. I am amazed how many times I go to my Instagram stories and I'll look at the number and I will be absolutely stunned by how many people like will go to that page. I mean over, over the weekend I think it was I posted something just nothing like thoughts on something. I don't even remember what it was. I and had over 1600 people that just looked at a 15 second story that I put on Instagram and a lot of people chat with me there too. So that's just like another place for conversation. And actually it's pretty good conversation. Cause that's where people, a lot of people drop me in. The direct messages there, the DMs get a lot of scoop. People share a lot of insight there. So I'm liking that as well. But anyway, and then of course, you know, there's this podcast, you know, once a week. But the Patreon, if you want to check that out, I have a few different tiers. You know, the most basic one, it's kind of I just call it off the record and it's where I riff on different stories. I went in there today to talk about what happened on Good Morning America and ABC News with Amy Robach and T.J. holmes. That was something, I have to admit, that I would. I had my eyeball on them. And the only reason I don't even watch Good Morning America anymore, I don't watch morning news anymore. I used to be an avid, avid news viewer avid. And now I barely watch it. But I'm certainly familiar. I wasn't really familiar with TJ Holmes, but certainly Amy Robach I definitely was from when she was at NBC all the way to moving to abc. But anyway. But I did notice in a number of their posts talking about training, first there was a half marathon and then a marathon. And I think the two of them ran a marathon together, I think. Or was that with their husband, Andrew Shue? But, and that, that was something else that I saw on Twitter today that made me laugh is how many times we have lived through Andrew Shue being dumped because he always got dumped on Melrose Place. I retweeted that. I thought that was hysterical. But it's also sad for him what's going on right now. But anyway, every marriage has their story. But when people train for marathons, as someone who's run marathons, I've run a number of marathons. You do get close to the people who you, you train with. I mean, I, I think every marathon I've trained with someone, you know, friends. And you do, I mean, you get very close to people because you run all the time and you do long runs together. And when you're running with someone, you're chatting with them and if you're, if you're doing a long run, like a three hour long run, you're going to spend time with that person, you're going to get close to that person. So I'm not surprised that these two, if you just looked at the photographs and all of it, so it's no big surprise, but it was interesting to see them come on the air today. And I only saw a recording of it and acted like nothing had happened. It was just kind of like a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Like we know, we know that you know, we know, you know, we all know. But we, as you know, are not going to say anything about it. Hmm. That's. It's an interesting way to go. And I did say on my Patreon and on Instagram, I thought they would do the Joe and Micah, the Joe Scarborough and the Mika Brzezinski from Morning Joe. I mean, they were having an affair for years. That one, I was way wired on those two. Clearly those two were having an affair. And I remember following along on, on Instagram, I even checked out, like Mika's husband's Instagram. That's how, I don't know. That's how I kind of knew what was going on there. But anyway, but that's what they did. And I predicted it on my Instagram story this morning. And I said, that's what I think they're going to do. They're just going to come out and not say anything. You know, just kind of act like we all know what's going on, but we're just not going to say that. But anyway, I wanted to provide a little behind the scenes because it was a direct request from my Patreon. Someone in there had asked we would love to know more about what you do with your work behind the scenes because publicly, particularly on TikTok, you know, I riff on current pop culture events. But anyone who knows me personally, I know many people who listen to this podcast know me personally. You know, my work personally. I'm not repping someone on television, though I will say I do get people. Now, I am at the, I don't want to label people, but in my, in my Hollywood echelon of people reaching out to me, I'm at the D list. I'm life on the D list right now, like with Kathy Griffin. But I'm getting people, entertainment people who reach out to me. So how's that, how's that for interesting? I, I'm all for it. I am all for it because people have, when you're in the entertainment industry, you have a lot to lose because you're very public, very public out there. But anyway, and not that I'm disregarding D list at all, but, you know, we all have our different levels. But anyway. But what I like to do is I like to analyze what's happening in the big picture. Because, you know what, whatever happens in culture and in pop culture, it's happening in the real world too. It's happening with my clients now. I mean, I'll have to admit, I don't have a client that comes to me and says, all right, I happen to be having an affair with my coworker right now and we've trained for a marathon and people are onto us. What do we do? I haven't done that. But behaviors, different types of crises, they can happen in the public space, but the same types happen, happen in the very private space. So even though I, I might be following along on something that might seem silly or trivial, what I talk about, like on TikTok, I absolutely bring it into my work. I have that version going on in my day to day work. So this is an episode that's just a little raw, you know, it's not scripted, it is not planned. But it's behind the scenes in my job. And I want to focus on, as I like to call it, the social media disruption forever. I called it a social media crisis. Because the definition of a crisis is when there's something that interrupts your work or the work of operations. If operations cease or interrupted because some incident event has happened, then it's a crisis. The term crisis, you know, back when you were working a couple decades ago, it was, whoa, stop the presses. Something's exploded. You know, something has completely erupted that was a crisis. Like the Tylenol crisis. Everyone goes back to that one. A plane crash, you know, a huge storm, Hurricane Andrew, you know, like those were considered like TW800. Like those were big incidents. Those are big crises. But a crisis now happens. Oh my gosh, it happens every day, right? Just open up the. Just go online and you can see some businesses dealing with the crisis. You can go to a newspaper, you can do legacy news, you can go Washington Post, you can go to the tabloid Daily News, New York Post. They're scouring social media now looking for, you know, these little mini eruptions that happen at these companies. And even though it might be in a national tabloid or an international tabloid, they still highlight things that happen in small towns or on social media. Like there's someone who I know on social media personally and she was in the Daily Mail because something that blew up, you know, on social media. So I like to look at these stories to help me in my work. So these social media disruptions are things that interrupt your day to day work that you have to take care of. And when these disruptions start to happen, they usually happen on social media nowadays, because if they happen, let's say in the office or, you know, something that's happening in your business that interrupts a business, in many cases it doesn't reach the public because there isn't any coverage of it. But something that happens online spreads like wildfire news, doesn't happen momentarily and it can just roll out and drip out over the course of days. It happens in milliseconds. Okay, Milliseconds where someone says something on social media and it's out. Just a quick example on the app nextdoor. I'm sure many of you are familiar with that. I happen to be looking at it today and I noticed a post. Oh, this is why I was looking at it, because I had an email notification and it said, do not work with Joan. And then it had her last name, then posted her address. And There were like 27 replies immediately. And it was just posted. And I went to look at, I'm like, what's this? And I opened it and it was already deleted. And I noticed the last name on the replies was this Joan. So she found out about it and she shut it down. But it showed how quickly it happened. So whoever this Joan is, her reputation was threatened online by her contractor. So she was probably, you know, she was probably, you know, I don't know, difficult, or the contractor was difficult, who knows? But that contractor went to social media. He took it to social media. So that's what I want to talk about, is the social media disruption. And I'm going to give you an example of two clients. One, I created a social media disruption checklist for them. And they are. This organization has been dealing with something. They have an outside group, someone who has a bone to pick with this organization, and they have an outside digital presence that's causing a lot of problems. And in this case, this client, the person, the point of contacts, I have a couple point of contacts there, but my primary point of contact, great person, good person, but there's something that's happening that's out of this person's control. And a lot of it started outside of this person's control. It happened before their time. You know, it was a predecessor issue, but they're the ones who have to deal with it. So we were creating a social media disruption checklist, and that's what I called it. I, I got rid of the word crisis and called it disruption. And we were going through the checklist to determine, you know, how do you respond, like, what exactly is happening and how do you respond. And I use the same theory and thoughts with another client over the week. And this client had a social media disruption, a big one. They were under attack. They were being defamed by Facebook, on Reddit. I mean, it was spread everywhere Instagram, and it was targeted. Lawyers were involved. So we had to be nimble in the response. And I'll admit, like, I was rolling the dice a little on that response for how to work through it. And I used, I used my plan. I used an indestructible PR framework where you own it, explain it, and then you promise it. The first organization that I was talking about, they did it. They absolutely did it. And it's working to an extent from an external point of view, but there's, there's just other issues to deal with from an internal point of view, which is making it a little more challenging for us because again, it's a situation that really did not start with this one person. And it's, it's very webby and just involves a lot of different angles and stuff. However, there is momentum there because I, I really believe if you are a good person who means well and you do the right steps, eventually it's going to work for you. It's not going to be overnight. Sometimes it just takes time, especially when you're working through history. But this other client, they were dealing with long term issues where, I mean, just for lack of a better word, they're being blasted. They were put on full blast and it was just a group of people in an industry that were targeting this company, this person. And what we ended up doing was that framework. And it wasn't one that was well received because they didn't want to own it. They didn't want to own up to something because they didn't need to, to be honest. They didn't have to. And I hate to be so vague in this, but I just, for client privacy, I don't want to disclose anything, but I do want the learning to be there. They just, they didn't want to admit that they did anything wrong because technically they didn't. They were advised to do something. I can understand why they did it, but I just offered an alternative view of how it looked because they did it. And I just said, let's just look at it a different way. Let's look at it with a little more empathy here. Imagine being the other person and having this happen, okay? Then you're going to get this reaction. It's going to happen on social media, okay? So the only way that we can make this go away is we are going to do the same thing that they are doing to you. But we're going to come at it from a place of acknowledgement, atonement. We're going to admit that a mistake was made. And we didn't say mistake, but they could do it over again. They would not have done it. They would have done it differently. But it doesn't. But we didn't change the reason why. We did not change the reason why. We laid that out very, very clear. And they just came right out and admitted to a mistake and they were able to get through it. And there were questions. I was getting emails like, oh, I don't know, I don't know, this person's saying this and Reddit saying this and this person said that and I had three different people sending me, you know, three different emails at different times. And I said, nope, nope. You just. You gotta hold it, hold it. I said, we. We can get through this. We are gonna clear this hurdle. Trust me. We are gonna clear this hurdle. Because honestly, when we released what we released, I was just waiting for the onslaught. It never happened. It never happened. It never happened. And I told them. I said. And I've said this before on the podcast, you. You will have your George Bailey moment. All of your fans will come out, all the people who love you will come out, and they'll support you, and they'll do it publicly. And that's exactly what happened. It's exactly what happened. So it works, folks. It works. So this social disruption, this type of a checklist, I want to walk you through three elements of it, okay? And this is what I did with. With both of these clients. Both clients, I have success. One is just a slower, more plotting success, but we are definitely getting there. And the other one literally felt like it was overnight. It was like we released it and done, okay, there's some straggling things, but I said, don't even worry about it. Like, these are just little extreme people that, you know, they're not your moderate metal. They are your extremes. They're always gonna complain. Don't worry about it. And that is exactly what happened. So here's just like, a little look into the steps that we put towards these social media disruptions to make them go away so you can go about your business and continue on. All right? So our goal is always to work around trust. Okay? We want to retain it. We want to build it, we want to restore it. It's always about trust. It's the trust of your customer, your consumer, your fans, your constituents, your voters, your members. You want to retain that trust, okay? Because once you've lost it, you've lost the battle. So if you're dealing with something on social media, if you want to determine what you need to do to reply first is you want to determine the intent of the person who posted it or the people before you draft any reply. Why are they doing this? Do a threat identification. Okay? So if you're looking at the post, so it could be Facebook, it could be Twitter, it could be Instagram, could be Reddit. All right? It could be the comment section on your website. It could be someone has a website against you. It could be someone has a Facebook page against you. But this is. If they're coming on your platform, you want to identify the person so one might be like the citizen journalist. So that's an individual who feels compelled to share critical information about you to help other people. Okay, they're there. And it might be a little sticky, it might be a little critical and thorny, but they feel it is their job to be a town crier, to tell people what's happening. Or you could have an inquisitor, I mean, someone who's asking questions. And these questions might be excessively harsh, but they're questions nonetheless and they could be put towards leadership. Or if you have a board or if you have some controlling group or a C suite, they're going to ask you the hard questions. And then another group is anyone who's concerned or confused, like they're just genuinely like, what's going on here? I don't know what's happening here. Could someone explain this to me? What's happening? Because those people will chime in too. And then the last group, the trolls, those are people who make inflammatory and sincere off topic, off topic comments with the intent of provoking. They want others to respond with emotion to create that disruption. Okay. And how you reply to these different people are different, you know, trolls. And I'm starting to change on this. Like I was someone who said never delete anything on social media because you want to respond to everyone on social media. So you're responding to one, but you're responding to a mass of people. It's a mass medium. Even though it's one to one, many people are seeing that response. So I always felt it was good to show your response. But that is changing because of the algorithm. Algorithms are changing. Algorithms on social media, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, they are fueled by angry rhetoric. Fueled. There's certain keywords. When a social media site sees those keywords, focuses on that, on that page, and that's what, that's why Facebook got dinged and what the whistleblower came out and was saying, because Facebook was feeding off of this rhetoric in the 2020 election. That's why it happened. Well, gosh, all the elections, I don't know if we heard about it necessarily with Obama, but certainly with President Trump with his election. That was a big part of it. That was a big, big, big part of it is because of social media. Okay, so for trolls, you want to delete them, they get deleted. A question of should we hide it or should we delete it? I need to do some research on this. I don't know if hiding it from an algorithm point of view, I don't know if, if Social media still sees it, you know, like on Facebook. But I still say it should be deleted because even though it's hidden, it still shows up as a comment. So people can see that comments are hidden if they count and they really look. So I don't think it's good to have hidden comments there. I think they're good for archival purposes because you want to save something, especially if someone is being threatened or threatening or too harsh or questioning. You know, why are you deleting me if you have evidence showing, well, this is the reason why you went against our social media policy. So you want to delete those. Okay. And then the other ones, you should reply, even if it's harsh, even if it's prickly, reply, okay, just answer these questions because we don't want people to roll over us. That's the other thing is when you don't reply, they get fueled by that and it gives them more power and they forget that people are on the other side, you know, of that social media. Okay, Some other considerations when you're looking at posts like this too, is, you know, how many people are in the conversation? Is it you against one person? Is it just like one guy causing all the problems, or is it a whole group? Like in the case one of my clients, they were dealing with a Facebook group with thousands of people in it, thousands of people in it. And it wasn't the whole page that was against them. It was a page set up for something else. But. But, like, all of a sudden, this group just happened to turn against, against this client. So how many people are in the conversation? How credible are the primary contributors? Okay, are they credible people? Do people believe them? Do people follow them? How mainstream are there? How many people know about them? How popular is their page or their website? How big is their social media following? What's the fatigue level of a complaint? Is it someone who's just going on and on and harping and harping and harping, or is it something that people are talking about? People are interested in it. If people are drawn to it, are the comments wrong? Are the commenters wrong? Are they right? And are they, you know, is there any truth to their complaints? You know, what are they saying? And also what are they looking for? Do they want an apology? Do they want to answer? Do they want accountability? Or do they just want to blow you up? Is it there for the schadenfreude? And if you make a correction, is it going to make a difference anyway? So those are the questions that you want to ask yourself. In the beginning, when you start to get these threats. Now step two, you want to draft your reply. And this is with social media. So let's say you're putting something on social media. You're not on a full blown crisis. This is just social media. You want to reply early. So I have a golden hour. And I'm sure many of you, if you work in this busy here, everybody has their golden hour. Right, but I literally have a golden hour. It is, you have 60 minutes to reply. 60 minutes. Because you're also working within the algorithm at that time. Because that means it's like a fresh topic, it's a fresh post. Social media is focused on it. So you may look at it as, oh, well, if it's negative, we want it to go away. You know, we don't want to highlight anything. But now you do. You want to get your answer in there when it's hot. And also when something's happening within 15 minutes, everybody is going to social media to look. So any amount of silence is the loudest response that you can give. Okay, Silence is the loudest response. Even if your response is, we're monitoring the situation, we'll get back to just something that just lets people know that you're there and that you can respond to it. All right? And so you want to determine, like, who are you writing the post for? You know, are you explaining a side of the story and if so, would a visual help you explain your side of the story? What is the goal of your reply? Do you want to continue good conversation or are you trying to end it? Because it's like a damaging reputation threat. So when you write these responses, you always want to be positive, but you want to be declarative in your response. Short sentences, no. Avoid information overload. Okay? Just stay calm in your writing. Stay contained. Get all the facts that you have updated accordingly. Keep any assumption in check. That's something that I do notice. Like with dealing with clients who are under attack. I recognize that if you're under professional attack, you can't help but take it personally. Everybody takes it personally. I recognize that with clients and I try to be very mindful of that. And I just remind them in many cases, it's not you. Okay? It's your position, it's not you try and just keep all those assumptions, what you think they're doing or why they're doing it. Just keep it in check, keep it contained. You want to also build your statements around key messaging. So if they're accusing you of something wrong, your key Message is what you did, right? If someone's complaining about prices, if someone's complaining about your process, your operations, a person, whatever it is, what is your key message? What are you explaining? Okay. And make sure that's a part of your response. And then you go through the indestructible PR response. Own it, explain it, and promise it. Owning is acknowledging whatever situation it is. Yes, we are aware this happened. You know, I'm aware that some people have concerns about how I'm doing. X. Okay. You're just. It's the elephant in the room. Okay? The second part of explaining is you want to be as specific as possible when you're describing what happened and why it happened. Okay? Speak from their point of view. What are they thinking about you really in this situation? Don't get emotional, but why would someone be upset right now? And you want to express concern and speak in terms of a positive outcome and positive changes and give examples where you can. And you want to use compassionate language when you're explaining what's happening. Okay. You're going to use words like we empathize. I'm disappointed, I'm concerned, I'm sad, I feel sorry. I like the word apologize over sorry. I have sympathy for this person. That was tragic. It's unfortunate, unhappy, unsatisfied. You know those types of words. Those are very colorful words that paint a very specific picture. Okay? And it puts you in a light of someone who's genuine and compassionate in their concern. And that's what you want to show. This is not where we want to be empty. And then the next part of that statement is the promise. It. That's where you're going to describe what's going to happen next. Where do you go from here? Okay? What's the next step? You're going to make that promise. You're going to share plans or steps for how you're going to manage this issue or incident. What are you going to implement? What have we learned from this? We're going to forecast a future result and answer a goal. We want to share the success that we're going to have. Okay. And the process. And I'm telling you this as someone who just experienced this was a client. We. We walked the walk that I just talked and talked. It works. It works, it works. It works. It doesn't feel good, but you have to go forward. Here's an analogy that someone gave me. When you're managing a crisis, you're managing a transition, okay? It's a transition. And every transition in life, if you Think about it is difficult, it's not easy. Just think of the. What does transition mean? You transition through life, I'm transitioning through the stage. You transition through relationships, you transition through gender. You know what I mean? Like, it's not easy. It's a process, okay? It's the same thing through a crisis. You are not getting through it easily. You are walking step by step by step. Or the analogy that you can use is this. Picture yourself in a canoe or a kayak, even more dangerous, okay? And you're going down a river and you know there's a waterfall up front, okay? Because you don't see beyond the waterfall, but you know you're going towards it, okay? And you don't have any paddles, you just don't, okay? But every single time you do something where you are taking ownership, you're acknowledging what's happening, you are able to calm yourself through it and you can work yourself through it, okay? A statement where you acknowledge something is like having a paddle, okay? You're able to navigate it. You can slow yourself down, you can, you can navigate around the rocks, whatever it is. But you know you're going to go through this waterfall. But the thing is, you don't know how far it is. The waterfall could only be six inches, okay? Or it could be six feet. But you got to go forward, you got to get through it. Because going backwards, you can't go backwards. You're just going to be paddling the whole time, okay? Because the current is going in one direction, you will be exhausted. You're going to go over it anyway, whether you want to or not, okay? So if you have the paddle and you're in control, you are going to be able to manage it a lot better, okay? I know you might think, all right, but what if you go where you hit the rocks and you splatter all over the rocks and you're dead? I'm right. That could happen. But that's not the point of the analogy here. The point is, is you clear it. You clear it and you just get through it. And you may splash in a crash, but you're going to be buoyant. You're going to come right back up again and you're going through it, okay? Because remember that waterfall, which you think is going to be 100 foot waterfall, and then it turns out, like I said, it's like six inches. It's just bloop. You got through it, okay? That is a framework that I use. It works. It works in real time. It just worked. The Last step, too, which I just realized I missed because that was a hard part, because you got through it. Okay, we're going down the river. We made it, we cleared it. You're going to keep monitoring. That's the last step. Okay? Keep monitoring all your social media channels. Check a Google alert, you know, set up a Google alert in your name. Just make sure you're monitoring what's happening online because you want to check if, especially if your crisis is SEO related. Because if it's a private Facebook group, you don't have to worry about SEO. But let's say you're blowing up on Reddit. Reddit is SEO, that search engine optim optimized site where the web, you know, Google can grab it. That's different. Or even an open Facebook group, you know, that's, that's all searchable. TikTok, you know, all of that is searchable. Twitter, you know, certainly. So you want to keep monitoring and putting out any fires as they happen. So. And once you do that, what you're going to happen, what you're going to see in that monitoring is that your crisis is going to go away. Your disruption is no longer a disruption. All right, so every podcast, I leave an indestructible PR tip. It's an easy leave behind tip that will help build an indestructible reputation. And here's the tip. When you're going through any type of an incident and it's in the public space, okay? And you feel vulnerable, okay? And you feel, without getting too graphic here, you feel naked. You do, you feel so exposed because people might be, it could even be the crisis of your company, but you might be the leader or you might be the owner. And it just feels so raw, okay? And you just feel awful. You want to remember it's not about you personally, okay? They are likely doing things to personally get to you. They are doing things that attack you. They might question your character. Everything that they're doing feels personal, but they're doing it through the lens of a business and don't forget that. So you don't want to respond personally, you want to respond professionally because they're attacking you personally. If you attack them back personally, they win. The crisis continues. It's like they're baiting you. But if you come back professionally, you'll win because you're the one who's coming at it the right way. And people eventually will see that. All right, don't take it personal. It's only business. I'm not even going to tell you the movie because if you listen to this podcast, you know the movie. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great week, everyone. Bye for now.