Fineman PR’s Top 10 Blunders List is a call to organizations to pay attention to their image as reflected in their organizational behavior and communications. Our list is not meant to degrade or defame but to educate and bring greater awareness to the value of professional communications counsel.
Everyone, including all organizations, make mistakes. Often a blunderer will make our List not because of the initial mistake but because of their response to that mistake, hence prolonging negative impressions. When confronted with a challenging situation, we counsel our clients to think of public welfare first, to avoid blame and speculation, to show care and concern for all affected audiences, and to assure those audiences that the issue is being resolved with good faith.
While we strongly believe that organizations must take responsibility when the fault is theirs, it is just as critical for organizations to understand that they have a responsibility to counter false charges and to set the record straight. No person or organization should allow others to tell their story for them. No person or organization can afford to allow misinformation to stand without a correction. The key to these kinds of assertive communications is in the tone. Defensiveness, obstinacy, arrogance, and name calling should not be options.
This year’s Top 10 PR Blunders List was marked especially by the role that online and social media played. This is a relatively new area of PR and many companies stumble when they miscalculate social media’s potential for influence. Examples here would include the United Airlines, Domino’s, KFC and Horizon Group Management Blunders.
We have received several inquiries about why some high profile situations were left off the list such as Tiger Woods and “Balloon Boy.” In our professional opinions, not all news making incidents are necessarily “public relations blunders.” Some that we ignore are too tragic, some are too personal, some are plain criminal acts, and some are just instances of moral turpitude.
As always, I welcome your comments.
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2 comments:
If a crisis is an event or series of events that jeopardize or halt normal business operations and prompt unwanted and intense public scrutiny (a definition I usually use as a starting point), then the Tiger Woods fiasco was certainly a crisis. Personal? Perhaps, but that is reality today -- there is no separation between what is personal and what is public. I believe that if a CEO were to be caught up in a similar series of snowballing events and the response was to go underground, we would be just as caught up in it -- and his/her company or brand would be just as harmed. Would THAT be too personal to include in the list? I hope not. I think you call out a number of situations that were just regrettable customer service issues and ignored the biggest PR blunder of the year. But it's good for seeding the conversation. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment. I welcome all points of view related to the Blunders, and, after all, I started the List to generate more awareness of organizational behavior. I wanted potential clients to have a better notion of what public relations was about and how it worked.
All that said, my list is highly subjective, and the process for selecting the nominees takes many factors into consideration. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the PR aspects and potential learnings of the Tiger Woods case, but, to me it seemed exploitative, and there was very little that I could think of to make it lighthearted in tone.
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