8 Crisis Management Tips for your business learnt from the #Wayfairgate conspiracy theory.

Today, I'm going to talk about why crisis management is like having a fire extinguisher ready at all times for your brand. Crisis management is something that's been in the news, because of #Wayfairgate. For those of you that are not familiar with it, Wayfair is the online shopping portal started in Boston back in 2002. The platform has some 14 million items on offer from 11,000 global suppliers. It's a listed company with a great market capital, and I'm going to talk about the impact of a crisis on their company. The issue with crisis management for anyone that's running a big company or for a public relations company involved in helping to manage those situations is, by definition, we don't know when they're going to happen or what they're going to look like. The real key with crisis management preparedness is being organized. When I work with clients on crisis management, we have a checklist of eight things that we make sure that they do. These are quite useful if you're interested in getting your company prepared, so in case of an incident like #Wayfaregate, you would be ready. If you haven't heard, there was a conspiracy theory that was spread last year originally through a subreddit on Reddit that Wayfair had been trafficking children through storage cabinets. This person had noticed several of the products were extremely "overpriced" at $13,000, and that these cabinets also happened to have names like Samiyah and Yaritza, and so the theory was that these cabinets were actually the names of children that were being sold into slavery and other nasty things like that. The very speculation seems to have been amazing in itself, but that it became such a large social media sensation is a testament to a couple of things. I've talked before about Watts and the cascade theory about how what we're looking for in viral stories is somebody that's easily influenced to absorb information and be willing to share that, and they do that because they've crossed over a particular threshold in their own mind that leads them to want to share that information.In America, there are some influencers, like Rebecca Pfeiffer, who has 110,000 followers and a fashion and home decor blog, and she had put nine different references to these conspiracy theories on her website. A lady called Indy Blue, who has 332,000 followers, said that the reply from the Wayfair spokespeople was very dismissive and a surface-level statement, which was absolutely insufficient. The slightly alarming thing here is that these social media influencers had been reposting these conspiracy theories. And in the words of one of them, they felt that it could be true, and therefore, they had shared it, because they thought that human trafficking, child trafficking was in itself a dangerous thing, and the logic of someone charging that much for a piece of furniture and having the names of children was evidence enough that something was going on. I got a Wayfair notification on my iPad the other day, and I guess that's why I found it such an interesting story. The Wayfair spokesperson, presumably a fairly stressed lady named Susan Frechette, had said in their statement that the products in question are industrial-grade cabinets that are accurately priced, and that they recognize that the photos and the descriptions provided by the supplier did not accurately explain the high price point so, "We temporarily removed the products from the site to rename them and provide a more in-depth description and photographs that accurately depict the product to clarify the price point." This, in my view and in the view of many people, was a fairly clear and definite statement. One of the first rules of crisis management is to accept that something has been said, but not in any way embrace nor endorse it. Their response was a good one in that it was explanatory, it was affirmative, and they explained the corrective action. It recognizes that there was enough cause for someone to want to write about this or speak about it, and it explained the nature of why these cabinets were considered to be vehicles for people to be trafficked in, but it also took control of the situation by saying, "We don't agree. These are not anything other than accurately priced but ill-described products." This, then, still wasn't enough. I've mentioned what Indy Blue said, that she thought it was dismissive and surface-level. Emily Heron, another influencer, posted a poll asking her audience of 1 million followers, what they thought of Wayfair, referring to the scandal, and 65% of her followers said that they believed the conspiracy theory. That's pretty phenomenal, both an individual having a million followers, and also, that there's that level of, if you like, information and disinformation taking place in the marketplace. One could argue, of course, that maybe her followers would perhaps be of the type to believe in this whole deep state theory that's unfortunately been perpetrated in America. Interesting enough though, somebody had then then said that the Wayfair issue was also a Black Lives Matter issue, because a large percentage of the 23,500 children who were classified as endangered runaways in America last year are children of color, so there's this sort of story on story taking place. If you look for #Wayfairgate, you'll find a huge number of websites including one called Stillness in the Storm, where it says, "Deep state fact-checkers can't debunk #Wayfairgate. Is Wayfair really trafficking humans?" What's interesting about this is its inquiry into the matter in the form of a question.The rest of the article, which I've read, doesn't say anything of the sort, but it's the sort of question that when we're doing media training, we want our clients to be aware of. It is setting a statement for somebody else to address. But because the statement is fundamentally incorrect and inflammatory, it's extremely difficult for a spokesperson to get around that. In our media training program, we talk about how to bridge. Bridging is to go from one person's question to where you would like to bring them for your key message. So, it's interesting that this whole social media ecosystem in America and worldwide is starting to surface. We had this with Brexit as well in the UK. It's partly because when someone says something like this, which is inflammatory but also unproven, it starts to trend, and some of these social media influencers then repost these articles, infographics, and memes, because they're trending. It's sort of like hopping on a bus without really asking where the bus is going to, or if you've even got on the right bus, so we have to be careful of that. When we do our media training and our crisis management, we talk about a number of different tools. I've mentioned there are eight. I've mentioned about the need, first of all, to give it an affirmative but definitive statement to demonstrate being in control. Then, we work with clients to ensure that they have a number of things prepared. Number one is that you have a list of all the key spokespeople for each occasion, because different occasions will warrant a different spokesperson. If it's a technical crisis, you might have the CTO. If it's a commercial question, you might have the CFO. In other words, it's not always the CEO who needs to come out and speak, because it's a good idea to have a definition of what are different priorities of crises. Some are life-threatening to the business and everybody around the business, but some are not life-threatening, and to always weed out the CEO whenever there's a crisis can bring a mismatch between the spokesperson and the issue. It also means that there is less opportunity to escalate in case the crisis grows. I always like to recommend that you have a number of people who are all prepared to speak on different topics. As a result, you have spokespeople and photographs ready prepared for different situations. We might have spokespeople looking serious and earnest, as I said. We might have spoke people looking happy and relaxed. We might have them in front of people. We might have them with a suit on and a suit off. Because in the same way that if a child gets hurt, we would address that differently if they got hurt at home to if there's a crisis at school and the child isn't hurt, but there's a place where the child is in a crisis. So, we need to have different materials ready for different kinds of crises. Next, we look at the kind of messages that we have for the different crises. When I worked with a very large consumer appliances company in Singapore in crisis management, the issue was that large televisions were getting too heavy for some of the cabinetry that they were being placed on. It was creating a potential risk and liability, especially in cases where children were watching the television and the furniture couldn't withstand the weight. We mapped out the different kinds of scenarios where different people would speak and the timeframe at which we would issue different kinds of information. It's good to have a holding statement ready, that within hours of a crisis being announced, you simply state that you recognize that there is a crisis. It's a bit like shouting out to a child, "Yeah, hold on. I see you've fallen off your bike. I know that's an issue. Wait for me. I'm coming." It's not saying, "I know what I'm going to do right now about your injury," but it is recognizing that there's been an accident of some kind. You must prepare different levels of statements which are all around business continuity, which crisis management, ultimately, is all about. It's about messages around how you're going to resolve the crisis, take stock, create, work around solutions and replacements, whatever the solution is going to be, and then what the future looks like after the crisis. Is that a future where the same facility is open again, but it now it's been cleansed or replaced in some way? Or is it an entire relocation? I worked with one company that found that, under former management, they had buried a large amount of materials under the ground, and the new management were faced with toxic waste coming to light, because the fumes started to come through the ground and were making people sick. It wasn't something that anyone could have imagined, but actually, it was, because the history of that building meant that they have been manufacturing there for nearly 20 years, and so one of the scenarios would be pollution. When we work with a client and our team, we need to think of all the things that could go wrong with our company, whether it's people issues, customer issues, facility issues, product issues, and write them down, "This is what happens. These would be our remedies. These will be the people that speak to those points. These will be the photographs. These would be the timelines." You'd have a holding statement. You'd have a call to a media briefing, or if that's not possible, a one-on-one interview or a group interview through Zoom. The next item is to monitor trends. What we obviously had in the case of this #Wayfairgate is that some of these social media surfers were basically jumping on a wave, but actually, it was sewage, not crystal clear water when they were surfing, but what only mattered to them was they they were on a wave. What we need to do is to monitor trends and use tools like Talkwalker, Cision, and Meltwater to track what's being said where and how. A quick look at the stock price of Wayfair shows that in April, it was $96, and today, it's $226, so plainly, this issue hasn't hurt the company, so the question is why is this company being targeted? Is it short sellers, do you think, that are a bit like the ones that have been speculating on Elon Musk's fortunate Tesla, or is it something more fundamental? Earlier in the year, there was a staff walk out, because the company had sold $200,000 of furniture to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, which detain people at the American borders, ironically enough. It's a company also that, when a reporter from Boston wrote about them, argued that their original sin is the genesis of the company, and that it is basically a digital platform that doesn't produce anything and just like Amazon, it releases furniture, but their company actually didn't even think of its own name; it actually outsourced that to a marketing agency. What's interesting there is that perhaps the best defense in a crisis management situation is the authenticity of the brand. There will be many people or some people who will leverage the internet to try and bring down a brand, but I've tried to explain a number of different tools and methods that you can implement now that if your company does experience a crisis, you'll be prepared.