TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Starbucks shows that the best way to deal with a crisis in the media is to diffuse it instantly before it takes off.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Okay, folks, people like me like to point fingers and make fun of BP and Volkswagen and other major companies when they destroy their reputations, do everything the wrong way. But frankly, you learn more from the success stories. And the success stories are often harder to isolate. Talk about. Because by the very nature of being successful, they keep their names out of the limelight and the mud off of them. Perfect example is what happened recently with the Starbucks Corporation. Here's the situation. Very famous movie television star Thandie Newton was at a Starbucks in London, I believe. Here's what she tweeted. Seriously. At Starbucks at the counter. Loincloth and safari hat on a black child. Happy new year circa 19th century. She links to a picture and it is a statue of a black child, a helmet on loincloth. And it does have sort of a 19th century feel to it. She was offended. I can understand why. So that happened on January 4th. This tweet. Now, I don't have the time stamp on the tweet, so I don't know what time of day, but what I do see is Starbucks reaction to that. Here's what they put. And this is from the official Twitter feed of Starbucks Help. It's part of Starbucks Corporation. And they address her directly at Thandy Newton. We are very concerned to learn of this incident and we can't apologize enough. We have removed the figure and we are investigating. Now, this didn't happen two weeks later or a week later or 48 hours later. It happened at 7:23pm on January 4, the same day. Now, here's the part that I think is even more significant is when you look at the whole exchange, it really didn't get much attention. So here we have the total count on this, and there's only 39 retweets of the Starbucks 64 hearts, meaning 64 people liked it. Now, for a major company to be getting in trouble, that is a ridiculously small number. And that's the whole point. They didn't really get into trouble. Now, I'm looking at the Thandie Newton original one. It only has 673 retweets. Here's my prediction. If Starbucks had not answered quickly, decisively, this Thandi Newton tweet would have had tens of thousands. It would have been a staple of talk radio shows. People would have been condemning Starbucks. It Would have been a whole big brouhaha. Excuse the pun, but Starbucks handled this perfectly. Now, they've had some issues lately with their holiday cups and other issues. I'll let people talk about that later. I do want to commend them here, though, for several. For several specific things they did well. Number one, the sheer timeliness of it. The problem a lot of big companies have is they want to have three committee meetings and have five lawyers write an opinion before they officially say anything to the world. And there's so much time that goes by that Twitter's gone crazy, the Internet's melted down, and your reputation has been destroyed. That did not happen here. Starbucks was lightning quick. And I don't know if it was 18 hours later or a half an hour later, but that was quick. So that was the first thing where they get very high marks. It's just the instantaneousness of it. Number two, they let people know this wasn't some sort of corporate thing where every single Starbucks in the world is going to have this stereotypical offensive black child. They let people know that. Number three, they apologize. And it was an unambiguous apology. We can't apologize enough. How do you keep attacking someone or bashing someone if they say, I can't apologize enough? So they've really done a great job of inoculating themselves from further damage on this issue, but that's not where they stop. The fourth thing they did well, we have removed the figure. How can anybody complain about Starbucks now if they just found out about it today? They've already pulled it from the store. And then five we're investigating. So presumably they're going to ask the manager, how did this get in here? Do you need some diversity training? So five very specific things that Starbucks did extraordinarily well. Again, they don't win every public relations battle. No one does. All you can do is look at particular incidents in isolation. And on that one, I have to give them extremely, extremely high marks.

Crisis communications.

Folks, we do isolate and analyze crisis issues here, and specifically how corporations, individuals, politicians handle their crises in the media. How they look, how they sound, how they come across, their strategy and their messaging. Now, I don't know if this particular one played out in other media. It started in social media of Twitter, and they may have, in fact, ended it. That in and of itself is a good thing. If a crisis doesn't escalate, then you don't need to be holding press conferences and you don't need. As much as I am a big fan of video you don't necessarily need to have Howard Schultz or your CEO doing a big video apology and making an issue bigger than it might otherwise be. So again, they handled it very well, quite proportionate. And I got to point out Starbucks is not a client of mine. So I don't want you to think that I'm buttering them up because they're a client. And I try on this program, I try to give you full relevant disclosure whenever I think it might be of interest to you. Now I have been doing media and presentation training for 32 years. So. So at this point I have thousands of clients and I've forgotten probably half of them. So if I mention some client and I got $1,000 out of them 18 years ago for part of a public seminar and I forget to mention it, you know, I'm sorry about that. But I can't remember all of them. If it's someone I'm actively working with, I will tell you that. So please keep that in mind. I do try to keep a run a clean ship here.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter jwalker.

So folks, part of what I do here at Media Training Worldwide is crisis communications training for big companies and governments in organizations. Every organization is different, every crisis is different. But the actual principles are remarkably the same when it comes to how to prepare for a crisis. For starters, you got to prepare before the crisis hits. Because once something hits, that's not the time to train. That's not the time to figure out who's going to be our spokesperson. How do we come up with a message? That's not the time. The time to prepare for any crisis is before the crisis has hit. The thing to do is to practice with pretend, with make up scenarios of crisis. So that's what I do when I go to corporations. I help them figure out what's a likely scenario that you could face that's a crisis. And now here's the media outlet that's calling you. Here are the types of questions they're going to ask. You've got to come up with your messages and you've got to come up with your sound bites. And then we practice. I put the camera on them and I bombard them and I ask them tough questions. I may browbeat them, I may vilify them, and I want to see how they answer because I don't want them to dodge my questions. But I need them to answer the questions in such a way that they don't seem like they're dodging, but they're focusing on the message they want. So for example, if, and again, Starbucks is not a client, but if I were preparing them for this sort of an incident, I would say, well, can you understand why people think this is racist and insensitive of you? The average, smart, intelligent, rational, logical, linear thinking executive might say something like, sure, I can understand why people think we're racist for having this, but I want to assure them. And then for the next 10 minutes it's all on message. Here's the problem with answering a question like that. The reporter can now pull out the part before the but and quote the Starbucks executive as saying, I can understand why people think we're incredibly racist for having this statue in our store. Boom. End of quote. And that's the only thing that gets in the story. Now if that were to happen, could Starbucks claim they were misquoted? Well, no person just said it. Can they complain about being quoted out of context? Yeah, but tough. Every quote is out of context. There's no such thing as a quote that isn't out of context. So when people complain about being quoted out of context, what they really mean is, I don't like the quote. The quote makes me look bad, the quote makes me look stupid. I don't like my quote. So instead of blaming myself, I'm going to blame this reporter. Well, nobody cares. If you want to get good quotes on your message, it is your job to to say what you want to say in such a way that it doesn't matter how it's edited, you are going to be happy with the results. That's what you get from good crisis communications training, whether it's with me or anyone else, whether it's in person training, which is always the best, or whether it is with online training.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

Folks, I have a question for you. Who have you seen handle a crisis the best in the last year? It could be a politician, a government agency, a major corporation. This is a trickier one because we tend to remember the bad examples. We remember the Volkswagens of the world. If a corporation really handled it well, we tend to forget. It just becomes a non issue. So this is a little bit of a harder question for most fair minded people to ask, but I'm going to ask it of you anyway. I'd like to hear from you who has impressed you the most with the way they have handled a crisis in the media. Something happened, they are attacked, they are accused of being insensitive, polluting, doing something awful, and then their spokespersons, their CEO, someone from the corporation handled it, reacted, whether it was on video, a TV interview, a speech or a tweet in a way that made everyone feel better and it took the issue off the table. I want to hear from you as to who this was and we can have a discussion right here. So post your comments in the discussion forum. Whether you're watching this on YouTube, listening to it on itunes, or at the website@mediatrainingworldwide.com I'd like to hear from you. And of course we're always happy to get your questions. This show is primarily about answering your specific questions on how to deal with the media, how to handle a crisis, how to give a speech, how to give a presentation, how to give a sales pitch, how to talk to human beings is basically what the show is all about. Thanks so much for joining me. As always, may all of your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success.

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