Mr. Media Training

I’m an Amtrak fan.

I’ve booked more than one hundred Amtrak tickets over the past couple of decades, and generally enjoy the experience. It’s an easy way to get from my home base of New York to my company’s base in Washington, D.C., and the trains (especially the higher speed Acela) usually get me to my destination on time, and without too much wear and tear.

So when I needed to make an itinerary change this week—a rare request from an easy customer—I was disappointed that the telephone agent not only wouldn’t accommodate me without an additional $60 fee, but seemed generally uninterested in helping me at all. (I wanted to board the same train I had already booked and paid for, but from a city closer to my destination.)

Since Amtrak has a Twitter feed, I thought I’d try to reach out to the company for help that way:

To its credit, Amtrak responded quickly:

But the link they sent me to was a webpage, at which I was supposed to fill out a generic customer complaint form. Not exactly the one-on-one customer service intervention I had hoped for — nor did they DM me (a rather standard Twitter customer service approach), as I had requested. I told them that in my next tweet:

Amtrak didn’t respond. 

Later that day, still frustrated by my experience (and still hoping to resolve my unsettled ticketing issue), I thought I’d try one last time:

Again, Amtrak responded – but this time, they sent me to their main toll-free telephone number:

I explained that the toll-free number was the source of the original frustration:

Again, Amtrak didn’t respond.

So all of that leads to a question: What is the best practice for corporate “social” media? Does it really add any value to the customer experience to have a somewhat responsive social media team that only responds by sending people to generic online forms and toll-free numbers?

Many companies have now integrated social media communicators into their customer service teams. Those social-savvy pros monitor their company’s feeds, responding to customers with direct assistance. Amtrak, however, seems to see social media as just another medium through which to funnel customer concerns to other channels—even if those channels were the source of the original problem.

I’ve been a loyal Amtrak customer who regularly praises the company’s work—even when some friends and colleagues don’t—and felt that I deserved, at the least, a respectful and concerned customer service experience. I gave them three tries; once by phone, twice by Twitter. Even if they didn’t ultimately satisfy my ticketing concern, they had several opportunities to make a genuine attempt to hear me out. Instead, their uncaring handling of my concern led to this bit of negative press.

When it comes to social, it seems to me that Amtrak is on the wrong track.

UPDATE: June 12, 1:30pm: Amtrak sent a few tweets to me this morning apologizing:

I appreciate the reply, and asked them to please call me to discuss (they haven’t yet). But it’s also too late to remedy this situation. As a result of Amtrak’s inflexibility, I had to reschedule a client meeting, travel to a city farther away from my destination in order to catch the train, and lose two hours of sleep (really!).

So here’s another question to consider: If a brand doesn’t respond in any real way to your first three attempts to remedy a situation — and apologizes only after you post a blog story (your fourth attempt) — will the apology be perceived as sincere? I suspect many people would question the very motive of their apology – is a sincere attempt to do the right thing (hopefully, and entirely possible), or is it an attempt to placate an unhappy customer who also happens to have a blog? What do you think?

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During the final presidential debate between President Obama and Governor Romney in October 2012, you may remember that Mr. Obama uttered this memorable quip about his administration’s military readiness: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

That memorable line was likely pre-planned—and, according to Twitter, it became the most tweeted-about moment of the night.

I’ve written before about the need for media spokespersons to create “tweet-worthy” sound bites prior to their interviews and speeches. (Click here to read that post and to learn the four elements all “tweet-worthy” sound bites should have.)

President Obama seems to have taken that lesson to heart. Two reporters from Yahoo! News looked at the data this week, and had this surprising finding: “Of the 50 major [Obama] speeches Yahoo news analyzed, in every case at least half of the lines were under 120 characters.”

The following pieces of data illustrate the rising influence of Twitter during President Obama’s tenure in office:

• 69 percent of the sentences in President Obama’s first inaugural address—delivered when Twitter was far less influential in January 2009—contained 140 characters or less.
• Mr. Obama’s remarks to a Joint Session of Congress in February 2009 were also 69 percent “tweetable.”
• His 2013 State of the Union speech was up a few percentage points to 72 percent tweetable.
• “His commencement address to Morehouse College in mid-May [2013'],” the authors write, “was 82 percent.”

It’s always been a truism of speech writing that short sentences are better than long ones. But that truth is magnified in the age of social media, when your audiences may take one of your lines and share it with thousands—or millions—of other people.

So before your next media interview or speech, ask yourself these questions: What are my tweet-worthy phrases? Do too many of my sentences exceed 140 characters? And if so, can I make my point more memorably with some strategic trimming?

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During President Obama’s State of the Union Address back in February, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) sat in the audience and tweeted a woman named Victoria Brink.

The tweets appeared to be intimate, with one saying, “Happy Valentines beautiful girl.” Cohen quickly deleted both tweets, raising the media’s suspicion. Journalists were curious why the never-married 63-year-old Congressman was tweeting a 24-year-old bikini model. 

It turns out that Ms. Brink is his daughter, although he hadn’t made that public. Cohen claims he learned that he had a daughter just three years ago. As he told WREG-TV in Memphis, “I Googled her mother, found out she had a child, and the math looked pretty accurate.” 

In this case, Mr. Cohen wasn’t doing anything wrong. But by deleting his tweet, The Sunlight Foundation, which catalogues deleted tweets sent by politicians, flagged his seeming indiscretion.

That helps prove one thing: Regardless of whether or not you’re a politician, if you “Tweet and Delete,” there’s a good chance someone will notice and become suspicious.

But “Tweet and Delete” has a flipside. Let’s say you want people to notice your tweets. Should you delete a tweet you sent on purpose while making it look like you had sent it by mistake? Is “Tweeting and Deleting” an approach PR professionals should consider using to help highlight their events, products, and brands?

Whatever your answer, Mr. Cohen used it. Since he had learned that the media would pick up on his deleted tweets, he used that knowledge (he claims) to “punk” the press by sending the following tweets to pop star Cyndi Lauper and quickly deleting them:

As he suspected, his deleted tweets caught the eye of the media. So he released a statement claiming he “Tweeted and Deleted” to help promote a cause. In a statement, he wrote:

“On Tuesday night, the President and Mrs. Obama, along with the Grammys and PBS, hosted a musical tribute to Memphis Soul at the White House. Wanting to promote this great program, which will air this coming Tuesday on PBS, I realized the best way to do this was to tweet and delete. I knew the Sunlight Foundation would highlight the deleted tweet as a Politwoop and knowing how some in the media report deleted Politwoops as nefarious, it occurred to me that a perfectly innocent, factually-correct tweet, once deleted, would receive great media attention. And that is exactly what happened.”

I can see how some edgy brand might make the “Tweet and Delete” strategy work. But overall, this strikes me as a dangerous game to play. Yes, PR pros using this technique might successfully fool the media and the public with a “Tweet and Delete” strategy. But it could come at the cost of their media relationships and their public credibility.

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After every national tragedy, you can be sure that some clueless brand will try to exploit it.

In today’s episode of “What the hell were they thinking,” the food website Epicurious sent out the following tweets to its 385,000 followers:

Get your legs blown off by a terrorist? Try these scones! Lose a cherished friend? Maybe this bowl of breakfast energy can help!

Okay, those tweets are beyond absurd. So Epicurious deleted them and tweeted this alleged mea culpa:

First, let’s be clear: their earlier tweets didn’t “seem” offensive. They were offensive. The word “seem” shifts the burden of blame onto their readers, who the brand seems to think were overly sensitive. It stops short of fully acknowledging the obliviousness of their tweets.

Second, a repeatedly tweeted template “apology” isn’t genuine. It’s a form letter. The steady stream of identical tweets does nothing to engage with the audience and express human remorse.

As a result, Epicurious diminished its brand with ill-advised tweets, followed by an “apology” that only made matters worse.

What should Epicurious do now?

1. 1. They can start by engaging with readers individually—and offering human responses instead of form ones.
2. 2. They can learn from KitchenAid’s crisis example from late last year, when that company’s brand manager personally jumped in, stated that the person responsible for the tweets wouldn’t be allowed to represent their brand anymore, and offered on-the-record interviews.
3. 3. They should pledge that they will provide everyone on the staff with social media training; and, if they don’t already have a social media policy, that they will create one immediately.
4. 4. Epicurious should pledge a donation to victims of the Boston tragedy in an effort to make something good come out of this experience.

I’m not opposed, as a rule, to brands promoting themselves after a tragedy. For example, Epicurious could have sent one tweet acknowledging the tragedy in Boston, and then a separate one featuring a recipe. But by trying to force a news hook into their food recipes, Epicurious committed a rookie mistake that will rightly tarnish its reputation.

Brad Phillips is the author of The Media Training Bible: 101 Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know Before Your Next Interview.

h/t: @EmpoweredElaine

Several years ago, I was waiting for an early morning flight at the Denver International Airport.

I was having a bad day. Not only was I nearing the end of a bad relationship, but I was in the midst of an awful cold and hadn’t slept well in days.

The only restaurant serving breakfast had a line around the corner. Only one cashier was open. I anxiously looked at my watch, knowing that if the line didn’t start moving, I’d have to leave the line to make my flight without an ounce of breakfast.

I had inched toward the front of the line when a second cashier suddenly appeared. But instead of taking customers from the front of the line, she started taking people from the back.

I lost it. From my place in the line, I shouted something along the lines of, “You’ve got to be kidding me! We’ve been waiting here for half an hour! This is how you run a restaurant? This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen! This is ridiculous!”

The other people in line probably thought I looked a bit unhinged. I probably was. Fortunately, no one caught the exchange on video from their smart phone video cameras. But could you imagine how damaging it could have been to my brand to have someone upload a YouTube video of “Mr. Media Training” losing it an airport?

An executive I occasionally work with told me a similar story. She snapped at a rude flight attendant, who promptly notified the pilot. Fortunately for her, she quickly cooled down and apologized profusely, realizing that headlines about a chief executive being kicked off a plane would have ended her career.

And just last week, Meet the Press host David Gregory earned these headlines for allegedly confronting local event planners for allowing people to park near his house and clog up his street:

The Washington Post: “David Gregory throws a fit over parking at D.C. Design House”

Huffington Post: “David Gregory Has ‘Very Public’ Outburst About Parking On His Street”

DCist: “David Gregory Goes Berserk Over Charity House”

If Mr. Gregory indeed lost his temper, he’s fortunate no one recorded the confrontation. (If, as he claims, he didn’t, the video may have bolstered his claim.)

In today’s social media culture, all it takes is one bad moment to ding a reputation or, in dramatic circumstances, end a career.

It’s a sad truth, but a real one: those of us operating in the public sphere — whether a television host or a PR blogger — no longer have any license to have bad public moments. Gregory’s arm flailing incident ended up costing him unflattering headlines. And although I got away with mine, I’m always mindful that I probably won’t be so lucky next time.

Are you more aware of your public behavior in the age of smartphones than you were before? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

If your organization is in the midst of a giant, well-publicized media crisis, you can safely assume that most people have heard about it. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about your response widening awareness of the crisis. Since the public already knows about it, you’re not going to make them aware of the incident for the first time simply by responding to it.

But what happens if your organization is in the middle of a “mini crisis,” one which is only known to a specific audience or is confined to a specific news outlet or medium? A reader named Nicole recently asked the following question:

“Do you (or others) have any thoughts about how to carefully refute a negative story without directing a new audience to it? For example, if you decide to communicate to your audience via social media or a company website or blog, are you inspiring those who may have not seen the original negative story to seek it out?”

I reached out to a couple of my PR peers for help in answering her question.

Jeff Domansky, known as The PR Coach, emphasizes the importance of monitoring before responding:

“Have you done the best job possible monitoring your issue, assessing the true influence and  “real” potential impact of your critics? When you’ve done that, you’re in a better position to respond or not. If you do respond, do it transparently and limit your response to the same social media channel or media outlet where it appeared. Only widen your scope of response if the issue threatens to break wider and farther.

Crisis communications pro Melissa Agnes offers three tips to help PR professionals know when—and how—to respond:

“If it’s a circumstance where others will come across the negative story on their own, then you’ll want to make sure that your response to the issue is found just as easily, and alongside the negative story, for those that wouldn’t necessarily go and seek out your company’s response. However, if it’s something that probably won’t make it past a very select few people, here are some strategies to consider, depending on the particulars of the situation:

1. 1. Leave a sincere reply to the original story/attack asking for a way to personally get in touch with whomever is involved, in order to fix the situation. This allows others to see your sincerity and willingness to correct the issue.
2. 2. If you want to refute the story—and no apology is due—do so in the comments section and link to more detailed information on your own website.
3. 3. The alternative is to respond to the story publicly and give the right amount of information so that others reading it for the first time will not feel the need to seek out more information—and leave your messaging with a positive sentiment towards your organization.”

The advice Jeff and Melissa offered is spot on. I’d like to add two things to their excellent suggestions.

First, note the tone of your reply. Be careful to avoid defensiveness, which tends to undermine credibility, and ask a few trusted people from outside your organization to read your response before posting it. If those trusted sources pick up on any defensiveness, try rewriting those sections. I’ve written more about the perils of media defensiveness here.

Second, be careful to give a “human” answer. Too many people in crisis hide behind a wall of corporate speak or barely human responses. I recently wrote more about that topic here.

Thanks for the great question, Nicole!

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Editor’s note: Melissa Agnes offers more about the strong negative emotional impact of a social media incident here.

We’ve all sat next to that guy, the one who discusses ostensibly “private” information on his cell phone in a public space at a decibel level more commonly found on the average lawnmower.

When you’re that person’s captive—say, because you’re on a packed bus or train with no other available seats—you might even harbor fantasies of exacting some sort of well-deserved revenge.

Well, some people are getting revenge by publishing the details of their loudmouth neighbors’  “private conversations” to their Twitter feeds and other social networks.

Call it “Vigilante Tweeting.” Let’s say I’m seated next to a loudmouth attorney on a bus one morning who won’t shut up about the case he’s working on. As I’m still wiping the sleep from my eyes trying to have a quiet start to my morning, he’s shouting about his strategy to beat the defendant. I could punish the attorney’s lack of discretion by sending out a “vigilante tweet” containing the lawyer’s name and the details of the case he revealed on the phone.

To be clear, I haven’t done this before (although it’s tempting). But others have.

Rather famously, PR superstar Peter Shankman was on train a few years back when a man seated near him pulled out his cell phone and said, “Apologies in advance, I talk a lot.” Shankman sent out a vigilante tweet telling his followers that he was going to live stream his seatmate’s entire conversation—and he did, using Yahoo! Live.

Setting aside the legality or morality of making his seatmate the unwitting star of his own Internet show, it’s another instructive reminder of the dangers of speaking too loudly in public space.

This trend has a less invasive, milder form, as well. As an example, I follow a blogger named Eddie Scarry (@escarry), who writes for the website Fishbowl DC. He tweets a regular series called “Eavesdrop Café,” in which he goes to a local coffee shop, listens in on other people’s conversations, and tweets out their quotes.

Job interview going on right next to me. GIDDY. #EavesDropCafe

— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) February 27, 2013

Reasons the guy has given for why he wants to work here: “The energy” (he has said this four times) and “the area.” #EavesDropCafe

— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) February 27, 2013

Potential new employee says he has “flexible” hours but “prefers” to work weekdays. Good answer. #EavesDropCafe

— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) February 27, 2013

Eddie is more respectful than a true “vigilante tweeter,” since he says he would “never tweet out anything that would explicitly reveal the subject of my tweets.” Rather, he says, “It’s simply a type of voyeurism for my followers.” And, as one of his followers, I can tell you that his #EavesDropCafe tweets are oddly compelling.

The bottom line? Remain aware of your surroundings and your volume. There may be someone within earshot who will capitalize on your obliviousness.

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I graduated from high school in 1990. In the 23 years since, I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my former classmates.

The only way I know anything about their lives is through my personal Facebook account. Although I haven’t actually spoken to most of those people in more than two decades, it’s still nice to know that they’re living happy lives with their partners and, in many cases, their kids.

But I’m connected to about 250 people on my personal Facebook account, which raises a question: How many of those people do I really know? Can I really trust them with the information I post to that account? And do privacy settings that restrict my network only to my “friends” really mean anything?

I thought of that recently when I came across an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Diane O’Meara, the woman whose photos were used in the bizarre Manti Te’o case.

For those of you who didn’t follow that story, Te’o was a star Notre Dame football player who fell in love with a woman he had met online. Although they never met, Te’o formed a deep emotional attachment to the woman, who he labeled his “girlfriend.” Unfortunately for him, the woman wasn’t real. “She” was invented by a young man who pulled an elaborate hoax on Te’o. The hoaxer used photos of a former high school classmate to convince Te’o that he was in fact an attractive young woman.

O’Meara, who had no idea that her photos had been used as part of the hoax, wrote:

“I thought I had been careful with the privacy settings on my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I kept up with Facebook’s privacy policies and took advantage of privacy tools. My private profile was not searchable by anyone who was not a “friend of a friend.” I even limited access to photos of me that were posted by other people and tagged on my profile. And I made sure that every post and tag that was on my timeline was there because I allowed it to be there.

But, as it turned out, that wasn’t enough. Even with restrictive settings, my wide circle of “friends” still had access to many pictures of me, and I had no control over what they did with those pictures.

One person abused that access. Many details remain unclear, but it now appears that the casual high school acquaintance whose ‘friend’ request I accepted, took my pictures, and they were used to create the fictitious persona.”

If you think your privacy settings protect you from nefarious types, think again. Unless your personal networks are restricted to a very small number of your most trusted friends and family members, you could be vulnerable to the same type of exploitation. Frankly, any of us who use social media are.

The most important takeaway for me? Don’t allow yourself to feel a false sense of security just because you’re posting to “friends” on a personal social network with strict privacy settings. The truth is, friends is a subjective term. So it’s probably a good idea for me not to place too much trust into the Facebook “friend” I worked with for a few months 21 years ago—and who I haven’t heard from since.

What do you think? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.