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10 Responses to “Cork’d Gets Hacked: Social Media Crisis Response At Its Finest”

1. Lemon Says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 9:47 am

   My day was quiet until I watched this! LOL!
   If i didn’t know better I’d think Mr V needed medication! But think it is is natural energy! His ‘Ma’ must be exhausted!

2. Dustin Says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am

   It is much more feasible for smaller companies and organizations. When you go up to the large corporations there is too much red tape to get through. We are obviously moving more towards this type of transparency in today’s world, but it is still years out before large corporations can respond this way.

3. John Mallen Says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

   Excellent response technique, which I will share with our network of PR firms (http://www.prgn.org/). Sarah, Gary is spot on with the strategic response, and he lifts the veil on what we think is a powerful and important by-product of the seismic shift in communications taking in this Web 2.0 era: the do-it-yourself phenomena. PR firms, like ours, increasingly need to help clients organize and equip themselves to respond and, like Gary says, not wait 24 hours for someone in the agency to draft a response and get it posted.

   Thanks for the post!

4. Sarah Marchetti Says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 12:45 pm

   Thanks for the thoughts. I’ll go ahead and share some of mine to keep the discussion going.

   I think that Gary was perfectly poised to do this right so he has an slight advantage to your average company. His attitude is perfect (receptive to apologizing for mistakes, turning negatives into positives), he owns several social media-based businesses and is all about engagement with others through social media. But I do think that while companies might not be as speedy as him or ready now, they can arm themselves with the tools to do something very similar if a PR crisis occurred for their business. It is all about being prepared with a good crisis communication plan before something happens.

   @john I agree with you that agencies can take a strong role in helping to prepare our clients for these events. Training on social media tools for top spokespeople and a good plan for a few different types of PR crisis senarios to streamline all the back and forth that can occur and delay that critical first response.

5. Ric DRagon Says:
   January 8th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

   This is right on. Goes back to the old Cluetrain Manifesto - organizations need to open up. The rub is, that this can be a lot of work, unless you build the infrastructure, and a series of ‘best practices’ - so that it just sort of happens as a matter of course.

   John Mallen, above, is dead-on, too - that PR Firms to need help clients “organize and equip”… not do it for them; but help them so that it becomes natural for them.

6. Marc Sirkin Says:
   January 12th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

   It seems as if all the comments and posts agree this is the right way to respond. If that’s true, then big companies should reframe the question - can they afford not to respond this way?

7. Cork’d Wins Where Microsoft Fails | rizzy360.com Says:
   January 15th, 2009 at 9:03 am

   [...] Other good discusion on the issue here: Cork’d Gets Hacked: Social Media Crisis Response At Its Finest [...]

8. Allison Majure Says:
   January 20th, 2009 at 6:05 pm

   Fascinating video proving out the PR principle that the size of crisis increases in direct proportion to the amount of time it takes someone of importance at the organization to respond. Immediate important-person response, smaller crisis. Multi-faceted use of social media to both repair the issue and communicate around damage done/repair status. Highly instructive. But for lower tech “publics” the question still persists….how to engage the unengaged into adopting social media????

9. Stephanie Fierman Says:
   March 1st, 2009 at 6:32 pm

   I do think it’s possible for a mid-sized to even large company to react as well as Gary did, under certain conditions. Here are the most important two, IMHO:

   The first, which can trump everything else, is the category in which the company competes. An industry that is heavily regulated, for example, is going to have companies full of legal counsel that understandably and appropriately will want to vet reactions and responses the company may have online or anywhere else. This is reasonable, as the most social media-savvy responder in the company may not be knowledgeable about a specific topic, and his lack of knowledge could have significant ramifications for others if the wrong reaction is voiced. If Gary gave a bit of bad info (and say, came back and corrected himself later), it’s very unlikely that someone could have gotten hurt in the meantime.

   Second - and I tell this to my clients when they ask if they should be on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else - social media tactics may be different, but the fundamental principles behind a company’s POV still apply. A company that has a very open culture, where people are encouraged to speak up and feel empowered, where people aren’t punished for goofing up now and then (regulated industries notwithstanding) - in other words, a company that probably reacted quickly and honestly in the past, long before social media channels happened to be available - could do the same online now. In this context, my contention is that - while social media tactics are unique and must be learned - any-sized company whose DNA is rooting in open and fast communication can make it so, regardless of the channel in question.
   - http://www.stephaniefiermanmarketingdaily.com

10. Brian Says:
    April 13th, 2011 at 5:24 am

    Oh, this is really great. I totally agree with you, he explains it very well! Thank you so much for sharing!
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