Discuss: How to deal with a PR crisis

We’ve all came across the odd news articles, gasped at the story, and sat up straight in anticipation of how a spokesperson from the company would come forth and handle the situation. Or, the situation could technically be left unhandled/unanswered.

Handle the situation right, and you become an instant hero, adding PR brownie points to your company and people remember. However, handle it the wrong way, you look bad, your company looks bad with negative PR brownie points and people remember.

The public always remembers.

Here are some examples of PR crisis within the industry and how they were handled.

Ensogo – Business strategies aside, leaving your consumers and merchants in the lurch after shutting down operations is quite the booboo, employees were even sent home without notice. Ensogo laid off their staff and operations suddenly went into the cold abyss of nothingness mid-year 2016, leaving everyone confused and angry.

In an almost snap of the finger decision, the company shut off it’s Southeast Asian operations and pulled the plug on its business units. The company’s co-founder Kris Marszalek (who also quit his CEO position) said that the decisions were made to preserve the company’s cash for new investment opportunities.”

Instead of dropping the vase on everyone’s heads and not explaining why, the reasons and plans for closure could have been better communicated to their stakeholders.

99.co – Look, you may be a genius at marketing, but when it comes to a game you love so much, you can turn into an idiot at the flip of a switch. 99.co pulled in their latest hire, VP of marketing, Sonny Truyen. Now, Sonny loves Pokemon, he really REALLY loves it, so much so that he went on social media to voice his outrage, calling Singapore a “SH*T country” because the game wasn’t released here yet.

Now, I can’t think of any marketer that would stoop to such a level of stupidity for this, unless the whole idea was to attract attention to the company, then my god, Sonny is a fucking genius. He got sacked within a day of uploading that status onto Facebook. 99.co CEO Darius Cheung also issued an apology on the company blog on behalf of the company, and them taking full responsibility of the rash actions of their employee.

The letter was issued promptly, and the matter was acted upon fast (firing of the employee), instead of a PR person fronting the onslaught of the media, the CEO himself stood up to the plate to give the company’s stand on the matter. Case closed, and quick, and we move on with our lives.

Let’s discuss:

• What other PR crisis has left an impression on you?
• What are the best learning outcomes from these events/incidents?
• Have you got any best practices when it comes to this?
• As someone reading news of “bad light” incidents, how would you expect the companies to react?