Saturday, January 14, 2012, 6:00 PM
By Janet Cho, The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- No one knows why a Papa John's worker in New York identified an Asian customer as "lady chinky eyes" on her pizza receipt last Saturday
But within hours after an exasperated Minhee Cho Tweeted, "Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn't 'lady chinky eyes,' " untold thousands had seen her Twitter post and photo of the offensive slip of paper.
The Twitterverse exploded with outrage ("WHAT!? Awful!" "My jaw = dropped.") and ridicule ("Better ingredients, better racism, @PapaJohns").
And suddenly Papa John's International, the world's third-largest pizza company, found itself having to apologize and defend itself for the questionable actions of a 16-year-old employee.
The biggest lesson for other companies?
Don't think this can't happen to you.
Social-media experts warn that not enough business owners have thought about how to handle a public-relations nightmare and protect their brands in a situation like this.
What's scary is that to the public, any employee who interacts with customers is the face of that business, even when they do something wrong, said Dominic Litten, social-media and interactive PR manager for Point to Point Communications in Beachwood.
The adage about how unhappy customers are more likely to share the story with their friends becomes exponentially more dangerous on social media.
Things that used to stay small and local can suddenly spiral out of control because people can share something with everyone they know with a single click, said Lisa Zone, executive vice president of the Dix & Eaton communications consultancy in Cleveland.
Crisis scenario ahead of crisis
The time to create a social-media response plan and decide who's going to be in charge of it is before anything terrible happens, Zone said.
Circle the wagons and do some scenario planning, said Ben Brugler, executive vice president of Akhia, a public-relations and marketing firm in Hudson.
"How would we deal with this, what would we say or do if this happened?" he asked.
"Decide who becomes your voice. Who will be your single point of contact?"
Having a policy in place also helps you avoid having other employees speak for your company, which could make a bad situation worse.
"While an intern or a very junior staffer may be really savvy about using a specific social media, they may not always be the best suited to serve as an external voice of the company," Zone said.
"It's all about customer relations. The only difference is that it's done in the social domain instead of at the returns desk at the local retailer or on the phone with a customer service rep."
Companies that test the social media waters with a Facebook page are sometimes surprised and unhappy when people post unflattering remarks about them.
But the point of having that page is to engage and interact with customers, to find out what is being said about your business and why, said Barbara Paynter, a partner at Hennes-Paynter Communications, a crisis communications consultancy in Cleveland.
That enables you to build your own community of supporters who may come to your defense if something bad happens.
'Know what's being said'
"It's important to know how people are using these sites, what's 'trending' and what elements of your business could actually be affected," Brugler said. "And of course, it's highly recommended to be a frequent user of those sites yourself."
Companies need to pay attention if the same complaints keep cropping up or if there seem to be patterns to what people are saying about them.
That's because the complainers who aren't satisfied with the answers might decide to kick it up a notch and launch a full-scale campaign against the company.
Some recent examples:
Verizon Wireless' fee: When Verizon Wireless announced last month that it would charge a $2 convenience fee every time customers paid their bills online or over the phone, more than 166,687 of them signed an online petition protesting the charge.
Within hours, Verizon had changed its mind.
Its president and chief executive issued a statement saying: "At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time."
Christmas FedEx delivery: A customer watched incredulously as a FedEx employee tossed his computer monitor over his gate, shattering it, instead of ringing his doorbell. He posted the security-camera video on YouTube.
"FedEx Guy Throwing My Computer Monitor" has been viewed 8,338,424 times.
It prompted a YouTube response by FedEx's Senior Vice President of U.S. Operations saying: "I was upset, embarrassed and very sorry for our customer's poor experience. This goes directly against everything we have always taught our people and expect of them. It was just very disappointing."
The FedEx apology video has gotten 470,099 hits.
Charity shopping trip goes awry: A Mayfield Middle School teacher who says she was told by an employee at the Mayfield Heights Target store that her student council members were not welcome to make their annual shopping trip to the store posted an open letter to Target on her Facebook page (which has since been taken down) last month.
After thousands of people linked to her letter via social media, the teacher, school district and Target said it was all a misunderstanding and rescheduled the trip.
Target contributed $400 in gift cards to help the students buy more diapers, clothes, toys and other necessities for Providence House crisis nursery that day.
Protests won't go away on their own
If a public relations crisis does crop up, companies need to react promptly, preferably within hours of the incident. "A story can spread in minutes," Brugler said.
Consider the fact that even when it's something positive, such as when Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow threw the game-winning touchdown in overtime against the Pittsburgh Steelers last Sunday, fans were tweeting about it at a record-setting 9,420-tweets-per-second.
Getting out ahead of the story will let you control the message and create a channel to control the questions -- and potentially shorten the lifespan of the story, Brugler said.
Whatever you do, "don't delete messages or hide them," hoping that they'll go away, Zone said.
When Target failed to respond to questions about why it was turning away the Mayfield students, people started Tweeting that their messages were vanishing or going unanswered. Target said it never deleted any posts, but its Twitter account and Facebook page never mentioned what happened at its Mayfield store.
Another big no-no is to blame somebody else for the problem.
When Best Buy warned some of its customers on Dec. 21 that some gifts ordered online wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas, it made the situation worse by offering "a non-apology apology," Paynter said.
The company said: "Due to overwhelming demand of hot product offerings, we have encountered a situation that has affected redemption of some of our customers' online orders."
"That's the kind of apology that if I were a customer would make me even more frustrated, because instead of taking responsibility and saying, 'We apologize that we don't have the merchandise,' " Best Buy blamed it on customer demand and its suppliers, she added.
The FedEx vice president could have said the same thing and blamed overwhelming holiday orders and stressed drivers, but instead he offered a heartfelt apology that helped the company save face, Paynter said.
FedEx's apology video is now held up as an example for other companies.
'Admit you were wrong, take responsibility'
Companies need to reach out directly to irate customers and say, "Give us a chance to make it right," Zone said.
They might offer a phone number or e-mail address so the person can talk to someone directly to get the problem resolved.
The best responses are short, quick and to the point and ideally fit within a 140-character Tweet.
"Admit you were wrong, take responsibility and don't minimize it," Paynter said.
In Papa John's case, the company Tweeted back within hours to say: "We are very sorry for this incident & would like to contact you to apologize."
It spent the next several days Tweeting individual apologies to every person who had re-Tweeted the incident.
Nearly every Papa John's Tweet since Jan. 7 says: "Please know the employee has been terminated & a formal apology has been given. We've also reached out to customer personally."
In the Target case, the store manager reached out to the school and reassured the students that they were welcome to shop there when Target just as easily "could've said that it never happened," Litten said.
"But once it became a national story, then it became a problem."
Social-media experts say that they can't predict why some incidents ignite and others die out but that businesses need to be aware of the possibility that something that isn't addressed could get bigger.
Restaurants can respond to negative reviews on message boards by saying, "We're sorry about your last visit and want to make it up to you," which both acknowledges the person's frustration and gives the restaurant a second chance, Litten said.
"If you take a previously unhappy customer and turn him into a happy customer, that's a much better story to tell."
