221: Top 10 Public Relations Crises of 2022

Hey there. Welcome to the Indestructible PR Podcast. I'm your host, Molly McPherson, and welcome to 2023, a new year. With a new batch of episodes in this podcast, I'm squeezing in an off the cuff podcast. I posted this to my TikTok yesterday, the day that this is published. It's a top 10 list of the PR crises of 2022. I wanted to squeeze it in timely wise. So the episode that I had slated for this slot is going to be pushed to next week. But I had asked last week, December 27, I posted to Twitter I wanted to know everybody's thoughts on the worst PR crisis in 2022. And hit send. And so this list is compiled from all of the responses that I received on Twitter. Now, I received a lot more than I'm doing in the top 10 for this, for this podcast, but everybody, I, I really liked everybody's responses. There are a lot of copies in there, some new ones that I never really thought of, thought of before. But this, this top 10 list is simply just the collective. I may have, I don't know, probably included some other ones. May not have added some here, but a number of people said them. So let's go with the list that they added. All right, number one, which is really number 10. I'm going to start from the bottom. We are going to start with the Try guys. Now, the Try guys wasn't much of a Twitter crisis. Now this is just, in my opinion, you really saw play out on TikTok and that certainly where I posted my first communication about it. Quick side note, when this whole crisis happened, we have the Try. If you're not familiar, the Try guys spun off of BuzzFeed. They are four guys who would, well, wait for it, try things. And one of the guys who made a brand around being just a great husband, Ned Fulmer. It was revealed that Ned was having an affair with a producer. Now, the PR crisis wasn't necessarily someone having an affair. I mean, that's never good for the brand. But the problem, the bigger problem, was that he built his brand on being a great husband. Added to the problem was the fact that the person he was having the affair with was a producer. So now you have a disparity of power there as well. And that was from Big Molly Media. As soon as I saw that, I thought that's, that's the Twitter handle I want to snag. So that was her answer. Number 10. Number 9. A number of people on Twitter came out with this one. I happened to pick Doug, I happen to know Doug. He said, for me, must Twitter debacle takes the cake. And that is my meta response for this top 10 list by having Elon Musk having the Twitter crisis in my top 10 Twitter list. Now. You know, the Elon crisis is so beyond really just a traditional PR crisis. And I think this is probably a good moment to even bring up this point about what is a PR crisis? You know, what's the definition? Because someone had replied to my TikTok, I will put a link to my TikTok in the show Notes about. You know, I had a description. I define a public relations crisis and how I kind of step back and look at it is a lot of people tend to look at a PR crisis as just one big event that makes headlines. I mean, unless you're in the industry, just everybody assumes it's just, it's just one big crisis. If you know about it, it's considered a PR crisis. But technically there's different, there's, there's different layers to a crisis in the definition. So if we were to, if we were to explain, you know, crisis management defined, there is a crisis at the top. So the definition of a crisis is some event that is sudden and it could be very serious, but it disrupts the routine of operations, your systems, your departments, legal, pr, whatever it is. If there is a disruption that comes with a reputational risk, that's, well, my definition of a crisis. Now, how we can split that is in two different areas. There is an incident crisis, which could also be labeled as disaster or an organizational crisis. So we have those two columns and one person, oh, PR Prof. Said academically, we refer to storms, et cetera, as disaster communication. It's in textbook, it's really just to distinguish control versus uncontrollable. It feels like a bit of a clapback when she says that as a PR professor. She's right. She's absolutely right. And that's sometimes, that's the Trouble with, with TikTok, you only have three minutes and you can only put so much information in there. But she, she's right. The, the broader term is disaster communication. But the way that I look at it is when you're engaging in the incident command system, and that is that emergency management system that you just engage because you're getting through an emergency situation or a disaster, if you will. So that's one area and that's different from a PR crisis because a PR crisis, when we talk about an organizational crisis, what we're talking about is something that is Negative that's happening internally. So there's going to be know, various perspectives on what's happening in this crisis. But typically think of what has happened internally to bring something down. Was it human behavior, human error? Was it embezzlement? Was it a cybersecurity incident? Was it Ned Fulmer having an affair with his producer? Do you see what I'm saying? That is the definition of a, of a PR crisis. So these are more along the lines, internal crises. So number nine, Twitter being an internal one. Yes. When the owner is Elon Musk and completely upends a popular social media networking site where a lot of people go from the areas of news and media, academia, you know, business. And in my world, in crisis management, we rely on Twitter. And if Twitter becomes a circus, you're removing a very important social network for communicating during a crisis or during a disaster. All right, next on the list, I did a bit of a mashup on my TikTok. I put eight and seven together. Eight being Kanye West. Yay. And seven being Adidas. Now some people ask me on TikTok, they say, why do you say Adidas? And the reason why, it's a few reasons. One is because I like to say it. It rolls off the tongue a lot easier than Adidas. And also the reason why I say Adidas is because that's how it's pronounced in the uk. It's, it's a, it's a mashup, if you will, of the two names of, it's really how the rest of the, of the world pronounces it. And, and the founder's name as well. So it's founding brothers and that's their names together. So I just do Adidas. But Kanye west, certainly his, his public relations crisis is, you know, it's, it's clouded with mental illness. We, you know, there, other than Kim Kardashian, his ex wife, saying that he struggled with a bipolar disorder. And a bipolar disorder, also called manic depression, can cause outbursts, you know, or outburst behavior, which certainly matches with what Kanye west has been doing. His anti semitic, anti black rhetoric is so hateful, it's so harmful. And it follows an alt right playbook of how they say things and do things to create engagement, to create views, to create spread hate. And Kanye west just, he always wants to push the edge, but he pushed it too far. Now this is hard for me because I live in a Kanye household. I have a son who loves Kanye west and he also way got me into Kanye West. I actually really like Kanye West. I think I've said this on this podcast. One of my favorite running playlists is Kanye. But he really kind of pushed it a little bit too far this time. Wouldn't we all agree? When you get into hate speech, it's so hard to, to pull that back in. It's really, really difficult. So he's going to have a tough road there. It's gonna be interesting to see who is the next artist that works with Kanye West. The reason why Adidas is tied in, of course, because the Yeezus brand, when, when Kanye, who was in partnership with Adidas and his, and his Yeezy brand, they were very slow to respond. Too slow. So when it becomes a story, then that's a PR crisis. And that was the story that I did an interview on NBC now with Joshua Johnson and where he was interviewing me about Kanye West. My son was giving me the side eye on that interview. Like, mom, how could you? Number six, Will Smith. I had a couple Will Smiths come up on Twitter. I'm on my TikTok post. One guy mentioned, he said, you know, thanks for the reply, but why no commentary on Will Smith? And there was two reasons. One, just timing. I was getting, I was getting tight on my three minutes. But also, it goes without saying, right? I don't even think we need to explain with Will what, what happened with Will Smith there walking on stage during the Academy Awards and slugging Chris Rock, a presenter. It's. There's no excuse for it. And then he came out with his apology produced video, which was a clunker to say the least. It was a disaster. It was too. To produce too polished and no sincerity whatsoever. He's answering predetermined questions. It was a nightmare. You don't want to do that. And he's still trying to recover, by the way. He is still trying to recover. Number five from the list, Hockey Canada. 1. I wanted to put Hockey Canada. I wanted to put Canada in there because I just have so many mutual followers on Twitter and TikTok and whenever I mention something about Canada, they appreciate it that, oh my gosh, someone is following us. But oh my gosh, I definitely follow Canada. I said this before on the podcast where I went to school, Boston University. And so many of my friends and roommates were from Toronto or from Canada. So I have an affinity for Canada. And now a lot of my colleagues are there too. So I see a lot of the news that comes out of there. I was on a podcast with Warren Weeks and John Paranac. Their reputation, Town Podcast. And we. It was a whole hour on Hockey Canada. Now, I'll admit it was me on a panel of Canadians, so I was not. I was not fighting at the same weight with the rest of them in the podcast. But I'm a hockey mom and I am from Minnesota, so I kind of know my hockey. And, and I could certainly see how this crisis, this, you know, covering up sexual allegations. There's hush money. It was a mismanagement by the board. I've done a podcast about it. I'll include a link in the show. Notes. Any organization that covers their tracks that, that doesn't use any form of transparency in managing this crisis. Think, think other sports. There was a USA Hockey little thing that came up. USA Gymnastics, women's soccer, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church. Whenever there is any type of hush money being exchanged and people refusing to speak, you have a PR crisis. Next, number four, ftx. Now, someone in my replies said, that does not count as a crisis. Here we go. It's from demorama. There's an interesting name. I feel like FTX doesn't really count as the whole thing just collapsed. Like saying Bernie Madoff was a PR crisis. Okay, I'm going to agree with that partially. There's a bit of a difference. Bernie Madoff operated in his own world. The reason why it became such a big news story is because people he swindled, a lot of them were well known within New York circles, certainly wealth circles, but also like Kevin Bacon and his wife, Keir Sedgwick. I mean, it became a big news story because people could identify, you know, with the victims. And also the Bernie Madoff story was. Was just such a. Such a big news story because it was so different. I mean, we certainly are familiar with Ponzi schemes, but this one, he was able to bilk so many people and he got away with it. That's what the news story was and that's why there was so much interest there. What makes FTX more of a PR crisis? It's not just a PR crisis for ftx. It's a PR crisis for crypto. Crypto. There's a lot of investment in the idea of crypto. There are a lot of people behind crypto. Sam Bankman Fried SBF has absolutely tarnished the brand of crypto, and that is the PR crisis. And it also created adjacent PR crisis for all the athletes who are involved. Kevin o' Leary from cnbc, he is in a PR crisis because he invested and then he went out and told everyone else to invest in it. Because it just like Tom and Giselle, it's the same thing. They went, they invested heavily in ftx. If the rumors are right, they lost a fortune, perhaps their fortune. And yes, I totally think their divorce is tied in to this. They're protecting themselves legally and financially. I don't know how, I don't know the details how, but that move, that divorce is tied in to ftx, I'm convinced of it. But. But that is the reason why this falls under FTX and. Or why it falls under PR crisis. And that's why I definitely grabbed that one. All right, the next one. Number three, I have to admit, full disclosure. When I saw it on my Twitter feed, I went, huh, I don't even know what that means. And it was Olivia. H O L I V I A It, it took me a beat and I was all ready to run to the Google run to the goog to see what it was. And then I figured it out. It's Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde. And I put that high on the list. And she was the only one person mentioned. Olivia Anula Mesta. The reason why I put that high on the list is because that was a PR crisis that dragged for a long time and it lived in social media and particularly TikTok. And when you have a crisis that just lands in that algorithm hellscape for a brand, it just doesn't end. It goes on and on and on. And I know this because I did a couple Olivia Wilde, Harry Styles, Don't Worry darling posts on TikTok and they got huge, huge numbers. And when I look at huge numbers on my posts, I don't think, hey, look at that content that I made. People must love it. They love me now. It's because my topic is about a trending topic and I just, I just ride an algorithm wave. So that's why I know that that was a big one. So that's why I added that for number three. Harry Styles, I think, was able to leverage that PR crisis to his benefit, so he was able to find the opportunity in the crisis that belonged to his former girlfriend, Olivia Wilde. Olivia the Wilde is the Olivia the Wild. Olivia Wilde's the one who shouldered that entire crisis. She was a director, she's a female director. And personally, I want to see a female director succeed. We should all want to see minority directors succeed in a field that is typically where success is seen in the hands of white people, white men especially, you know, Hollywood. So we want to support that. So this was her second. This was her second film. I Believe. And so we want her to see receive some success. However, she was the director and she hooked up with one of her stars of the film. Okay, that is no different than a CEO hooking up with an employee. And that where, that's where it gets a little snaky, folks. And that's why it's a PR crisis. It was internal. There was an organizational crisis. The director had an affair with an actor. Now, if we were to believe the scoop, the gossip, the blind gossip, is that Florence Pugh hooked up with Harry Styles before that. And that might be part of the reason why Florence Pugh wasn't that happy with Olivia Wilde. Whatever it is, it got messy. And when things get messy, they create a crisis. So that is number. That's number three. Number two is another huge crisis because it's a huge, It's a huge star, huge artist, but also had a lot of legs on social media. And again, I know this from my posts. Taylor Swift with Live Nation, Ticketmaster. Now, I'm not adding even on my list on TikTok, I didn't say Taylor Swift. As a matter of fact, I didn't even mention name. It is a Ticketmaster Live Nation crisis. And what I had mentioned is Taylor Swift. I feel that she kind of knew all of this was going to happen, that she heard she would work with Ticketmaster to roll out her. Her tour. Bruce Springsteen had the same problem he had. He had dynamic pricing when his tickets went on sale. And the ticket master, Ticket Master fiasco behind the scenes was a nightmare for ticket buyers. I, I know this because I speak from experience. I purchased tickets and I was on the phone with a friend of mine and he was higher in the queue than me. So I was working and I was listening to him as his numbers went up. And then all of a sudden, my numbers just jumped to. I was, I was, I was at oblivion. The number of oblivion to like 50,000 or something. And then I was coming up, it was like 500, 400, 300. And I panicked. I, like, I didn't know what to do. And I'm telling him, like, I don't know, what do I do? What do I do? I just panicked and my heart rate was racing. And then I got in there and I've purchased tickets a million times on Ticketmaster, but I didn't understand when there was so much demand, which ticket I was supposed to buy, because if I buy it once, do I lose my place in line? You know? So I made the colossal error of just doing best price. I think which I should have done best seating. And I got crampy tickets. And then I'm telling him on, like. Like, what do I do? And I didn't know, do I want two? Do I want four? The stress. So I ended up getting my four tickets. But still. But that was Bruce Springsteen. So you knew when Taylor Swift. I mean, if I knew Taylor Swift was going to be a shite show, then everybody did, including. Including Taylor Swift. And that's why this was a PR crisis for Ticketmaster. They rolled it out, and then, of course, it was a complete disaster. And then you have this army of Swifties who were voicing very vocally all over social media how they felt about the problems. Ticketmaster came out with a blog post, and then they immediately took it down. A couple days went by, and then they came back up again on a Friday, they had another blog post. And that blog post essentially said it was, you know, three talking points. I talked about it in a earlier podcast, the three talking points or no, on a TikTok that they essentially said, you know, we weren't prepared for it. Taylor is such a huge artist that we couldn't. The Internet could not support it. She broke the Internet. But also they blamed a lot of it on bots, too. And they just made it very complicated. And then they only talked briefly about the aftermarket. But that was the second crisis that certainly qualified for that. And arounding out the list at number one is Southwest Airline Lines. This is a very recent crisis. Someone had asked on TikTok, would this be a crisis? Would this be on the list if it hadn't just happened? And I said, yes. There was certainly an availability bias happening there. Oh, yeah. She said, why does it feel like all these were last quarter of the year? Or am I just feeling like this 2022 went super quickly. And then there was another. There was another post. Someone said, should Southwest incorporate the typical brand humor as they try to repair from the crisis? Tough line to walk. And I went, oh, yeah, definitely type people's, you know, holidays, I mean, were ruined and not. I mean, just the. You know how horrible it is. Like when you miss one flight. Imagine being an airport for days. I mean, just a nightmare. They should not do their humor at all. What they should, should have done, oh, my goodness. What they should have done is managed it a lot better. And this is why it's a crisis. So in the beginning, I had mentioned the difference between a disaster. Under a crisis, there's a disaster or an incident and then there's an organizational crisis. What Happened with Southwest, it was like the two of them just came together in, like, a cyclone, like just Winter Storm Elliot in the version of a crisis, because you had that storm and all the damage it was doing around the country. I mean, my goodness, people in Buffalo were dying in their cars and out, you know, in the streets. So we certainly had that storm. But that came up against a breakdown in the organizational systems. So their systems weren't working. They were having a breakdown with employee communication. They were having a breakdown with getting employees to work. And they had to have an edict that went out in a memo that naturally was linked, leaked. I posted it on Twitter, essentially saying, you have to come to work, and if you don't, you need a doctor's note, and telehealth doesn't count. So for a airline that touts itself as an airline for the people, Capital P, they lost big. And the other examples that I know from this, someone else had tweeted, he. He's a police chief, so whenever he tweets, I always listen to him. And he happened to be on a Southwest flight because he was flying back. And he said that the pl. The pilot of his flight going back to bwi, was complaining about Southwest on the PA system on a plane. So that's how, you know it's a PR crisis. The other part where they really dropped the ball is. Is their rollout of their communication. The CEO was very late to the game on this one. The first. The first video response that I saw came out of a state from a station manager in Hobby at the. At the Hobby Airport. He did a very good job. He did a very good job. But that was the first video that we saw. I mean, there were other spokespeople instead of our CEO. And then the CEO, Bob Jordan, eventually came out. It was a video that was posted to their. Their media center, their newsroom. Um, it has the script there as well. I mean, the script, when you read it, like, okay, it's a good script. But the video itself was very lackluster. It lacked any type of compassion or empathy for what the passengers were going through. And the big miss, the employees, the people, as they say with the Capital P, it was very dry, very bland, pablum like. And it was not a video that looked like a CEO cared one bit. So that's the top 10 list. Now, I will add there are more people that chimed in on TikTok with their. With their opinions. And part of the distinction is that this was a Twitter list, and Twitter is a little bit different than Tick Tock. Tick Tock's going to have a different nature to their PR crisis. Like some of the, some of the examples, someone said Bethany Frankel, I mean, definitely that was a Twitter meltdown for Bethany Frankel. Of course, there's a lot of Harry and Megan's. There's a lot of. Oh, gosh, I'm going down the list right now. I'm not editing this podcast, so. Oh, here it is. James Corden, like, definitely that would be one that would be on the list. Some other runner ups, FIFA, the World Cup, Prince Andrew, certainly the one that I missed. And it came out of Instagram stories. I posted it in Instagram stories as well. Follow me on Instagram. By the way, I'm gonna be putting a lot more energy into that social media network because Instagram stories, so many of you go to my Instagram stories and that's where we have chats and stuff. So I'm loving Instagram stories right now. So definitely check me out there. Someone, Anna, she mentioned Uvalde. I totally missed it. And that's a total Twitter crisis. And I missed it. Uvalde, Texas. What happened to those, those children, those poor children? That's. That's an incident. What happened. But the PR crisis was the breakdown in the organizational structure of the police, chief of police and everything that happened there. And when you watch that video, that heartbreaking video. Oh, my God, the hour, I mean, the minutes that tick by. Can you imagine being a parent with a child in that room? Oh. Oh. Anyway, that is very, very sad. So I can't leave it on that note. That's a sad note. I know. Let's leave it on the indestructible PR tip. In every podcast, I always leave one easy to remember leave behind tip to help you build an indestructible reputation. And here's where it, here's what it is. There is a through line in this entire list. List 1 through 10 of these PR crises and all the other ones that I mentioned as well. So for 2023, there's one word that I want you to think about in your business. So whether or not like you run a business, you own a business, or your brand and your name is the brand, I want you to think about this one word, and that is exposure. What would happen if someone exposes you? Is there something that that can be exposed? Is there a behavior? Is there something hidden? Is there hush money? Is there hush actions? Is there a lack of transparency? Is there some organizational gap that could lead to some type of crisis? Because nothing gets by anyone nowadays. Something may come out on social media immediately, or it may take a while, but eventually, eventually, someone always finds out. Close the gaps. Remove any and all exposure. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Let's have a great 2023. Bye for now.