When There’s Trouble: Fix, Don’t Spin
Posted by Rod Armstrong, December 7th, 2006
Reputation is important, especially for businesses and services.
Doubly so for Internet-based services (like Web Hosting), where literally thousands of hungry competitors are just a Google search away.
Keeping your reputation stellar is a fairly epic battle that gets exponentially tougher the bigger and more successful you become. Even when your business machine is well-oiled, running smoothly and you are pretty darn good at keeping just about everyone happy all of the time, it’s still very likely that something, somewhere can and will go wrong. And heaven forbid that many things go wrong in many different places.
When some obstacle eventually does come forth: whether your customer satisfaction levels start to drop off, you get a bad write-up in a magazine, or a lovely blogger singles you out as the devil, the most immediate tendency is to fly directly into Full-On State of Emergency mode.
This isn’t a bad thing. After all, years of positive reputation building can go down the drain with just a few negative blemishes. Negative word of mouth spreads ten times faster than positive. (I’m not sure if this is true exactly, but it sounds right.) Immediate response to the issue is critical. However, in this day and age, the first instinct to such a seemingly dire situation is often this: what do I say in response? How do I keep [whatever negative message] from spreading? How do I play damage control? How do I spin, manipulate, counteract, defend, attack, save face, foil, act the fool, et al.?
This indeed seems like a reasonable first instinct because this is often what we see from the big, established players. This is almost always their first response strategy to some type of public problem. Not to mention that we see the same from politicians, governments, media outlets, celebrities.
So it might go without saying at this point, but Internet businesses don’t need to behave like giant corporations or celebrities. Unless you have dedicated PR people at your disposal (and well, even if you do), your first reaction to a possible Reputation Crisis shouldn’t be how you can spin your way out of it. It should be how you can fix it. If the bruise is public, you may even feel hurt and defensive. Keep an open mind towards criticism. When your first instinct is to defend your honor to the death, there may certainly be a valid suggestion hidden under even the most inflammatory and idiotic of critiques.
Save your resources for the problem itself, may that ever-curious Public Eye be damned.
Reflect. Listen to your own clients and employees. Try to find the root cause of the issue, and fix it quickly before it becomes worse. And don’t talk about it. Except with your own customers, that is. They deserve the disclosure about how and why things are improving, and they will probably, hopefully, have your back even more when your reputation is again put to the test. Effectively and healthily dealing with a critical situation can speak volumes more than a little exaggerated bad gossip once everything is said and done.
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