Open The Dialogue

Very recently, there have been a few mentions of what *really* happened behind the scenes at Kryptonite Lock Company, notably at Dave Taylor's and Debbie Weil's blogs. Taylor has the "real story" of what went down when a Kryptonite lock was found to be "pickable" by using the body of a pen, a story that many of us in the PR biz have used as a case study of how the actions (or inactions) of businesses towards forum readers/posters and bloggers positions a brand going forward.

The reason I'm pointing these blogs out today is to further clarify what really happened. While Kryptonite didn't directly respond to the buying public immediately, it did speak with the press on the matter. The company's spokesperson, Donna Tocci, is right on to point out that Kryptonite was aware of the discussions going on on blogs, forums, etc., but that doesn't mean that the best decision was not to respond. Tocci says the following in the interview with Taylor:

Five business days after the post, Kryptonite announced an outline of a plan for a lock exchange program noting that three business days after that the full plan would be in place. Eight business days after the first post, Kryptonite announced its full, free Lock Exchange Program and began taking registrations that day. We began the first exchanges a few weeks later.

Sounds reasonable, right? Also clarifies that the firm was immediately looking for a way to make good with its customers, and the general public. But while Tocci makes it clear that the company was working hard from zero-hour in order to get a proper plan in place, which is what any good crisis management or PR pro would recommend, that doesn't mean that the company should have made no announcements - on its own volition, not through press inquiries - for a few days. A few grafs later, Tocci states:

Companies absolutely need to keep track of the blogosphere. I agree with that. However, I think it is only a segment of what companies should look at for their marketing and publicity plans. There are millions of blogs, but what are the audiences of these blogs? We know that lots of teens and college students have blogs and mainly use them to communicate with friends and family. These are our customers, but are they going to corporate blogs? Not so sure about that.

This is mostly true - not every single customer of Kryptonite's (or any company, for that matter) will subscribe to a corporate blog - but that doesn't mean that having a blog, or at the least an easily editable Website that carries a priority message about a particular topic can't be set up already. For reasons we don't need to explain here, it should be noted that not only do many blogs (corporate or otherwise) gain significant favor through search engines, but bloggers who get much of their information from other blogs would end up finding Kryptonite's direct response on its blog through a search tool like Technorati or on a site such as Tech.memeorandum.com were it published that way. People (teenagers, college students) that Tocci is describing ARE reading things online, which is how this whole story spread. If Kryptonite had set up its own presence to address this matter, there wouldn't be disinformation floating around to this very day about the situation. Heck, it would be well worth it for Kryptonite to buy all of the darn Google AdWords relevant to the issue and direct people to its own Website where a message could have been set up to address it.

Tocci also says "If we'd announced what we wanted to do before we had the back end in place and couldn't back it up, that would have been the bigger PR nightmare, right?" - and to some extent she's correct. But what's so wrong with coming out and saying something to the effect of "Kryptonite is aware of the problems with product xyz, and is currently setting up an online forum / return process / exchange arrangement, which will be announced shortly. For regular updates, please sign up for our issue specific mailing list here." and offer an opportunity for people to put in an email so they would know what Kryptonite was up to immediately when it happened, not when the customer just happened to have time to come back to the Website. It's proactive, even if the company hadn't set up the fulfillment houses and other backend items. Not saying anything to the public - irrelevant of what the press 'knew" at the time - looks like inaction in this case, and in most cases. Additionally, the statement that "no bloggers called the company" is probably right on, but it should be pointed out that from a blogger's perspective, not all companies are interested in dealing with unaffiliated writers like them, and will not always answer questions pointed to them by a blogger - though that's certainly changed since this happened a bit more than a year ago. Certainly part of the onus is on bloggers for not following up on this story, and perhaps this is the "gap" between journalism and blogging, and where the two partially meet, but not really. But that doesn't mean we can just sit here, shrug our shoulders, and say "no one really knew that this was the situation because no bloggers called us."

To me, just looking at the chart that Debbie Weil has included in the middle of her posting is evidence enough that the lack of clarification on issues for a few days definitely affected the issue in question, but perhaps that it purely my perception. This isn't about making crisis communications plans that solve the problem within hours (if not minutes) - this is about using the tools available to communicate to your customers, prospects, constituents, or interested parties, on your grounds, and not letting the ill-informed "own" the conversation on its own.

It's true that you can't answer every single blog and forum post on every single topic or problem. But that doesn't mean you can't work the space to enter the conversation on your own. Why not take the "most influential blogs" Tocci discusses that were writing about the situation and choose to comment there. The whole "we'll talk to you when you come to us" idea is over. It's yesterday's (last year's?) news. I don't think that every blogger is expecting to hear from a company when s/he writes about it, but you'd be surprised at the reactions bloggers have made to companies a) noticing that the blog exists and b) actually writing something in non-corporate gobbledygook in response to the posting. Crisis communications isn't about waiting for a customer to come to you with an exploding cellphone battery or whatever, it's about knowing that people are talking about it, and defusing, or mitigating (trust me, you're not erasing it, unless it's factually wrong) the situation.

You don't own your brand.

The faster that everyone realizes that, and grasps the fact that public perception isn't something that is only driven by what marketing slogans come out and what advertisements are on television and who is a spokesperson for what brand, the better off we'll all be. It's about participating in the conversation, and attempting to get your goals fulfilled. Wouldn't you rather try and satisfy your customers and build on that public perception than let the fur fly, try and pick it up later, and then expect that everything will be okay? I don't know about you, but I most certainly don't feel that public perception is where it should be when it comes to Kryptonite, even knowing all the facts that the company's spokesperson has put on the table. This might have been the right thing five years ago (heck, two years ago probably), but the Internet - forums and blogs included - are a completely different animal. And when the fur flies, it's not coming off with the lint brush sitting on your dresser (read: the old way of doing things).