Thanks to Steve Smith of Growth Source Coaching for having me on this Facebook live broadcast courtesy of the Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce.
Steve Smith:
Good afternoon, and welcome to Open for Business. This show is the sole creation of the Lake Forest Chamber of Commerce and our CEO Mary Visconte who actually thought up this concept when the lockdown took place four or five weeks ago, so we’re very thankful to be on. Part of our goal is to bring you great content and guest speakers every day so that you can get some great ideas about how to guide your business through this alternative universe that we’re all living through. If this is your first time watching, we invite you to look out for the social media posts that we’re putting out every day announcing upcoming shows, topics, speakers, and that way, so you’ll kind of know what’s coming. If you haven’t seen any of the prior shows, feel free to visit our library, which is in the Video tab on the Lake Forest Chamber page. There’s a ton of content, past video information, and interviews so you can kind of pick through it and figure out what’s important to you.
If there’s things that you like and things you know some of your colleagues might benefit from, share it with them, share it with them, post things, put some tags in for the Lake Forest Chamber because we’re really trying to get the word out. Over the last four weeks, we’ve been doing this, I think everybody’s done a great job of spreading the word and getting involved, and that’s kind of what we’re looking for. There’s plenty of media out there talking about the disease and death statistics and all the other things. This show is basically focused on providing a voice to the small business community. We’re thankful for partners like the San Juan Chamber of Commerce who recently came on as a partner and is helping us out, and we’ve got other cities that have been reaching out to us wanting to contribute. It’s been really kind of a great small business movement here in South Orange County.
Today this is going to be really good. You guys are going to enjoy this, because one of the side effects of the lockdown and all of the other things that have taken place since the coronavirus showed up, were some of the issues that have been hitting small businesses and large businesses everywhere. Of course, everybody’s focused on the lack of revenue, or being shut down completely, operating at half-speed, trying to get loans, all really important stuff. But there’re other things that are happening which could cause businesses, situations that they’re not prepared for.
If you’ve been watching any of the local media, you know that PR crises can take place. All of a sudden out of the thin blue, you all of a sudden are embroiled in a negative commentary. It could start on social media, but it could eventually hit the national news. Fortunately, most of our politicians have been able to take to the airwaves for that, but we’re now looking at businesses and other organizations that are guilty of this and then falling into this. What do you do when you get negative press? What do you do when you’re embroiled in a crisis that maybe wasn’t of your making?
Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to invite on a guest. He is a crisis PR expert, a friend of mine for many years. His name is Dave Oates. He has a PR security systems business down in San Diego. We’re going to bring him on right now, and let him introduce himself, and then we’ll get right into the topic.
Steve Smith:
Hey, Dave.
Dave Oates:
Hey.
Steve Smith:
Where are you now? It’s a huge backdrop you’re dealing with or is that one of those green-screen things.
Dave Oates:
Okay. I actually decided I was going to try being outside since it’s so nice today, and so I did that. I like your graphic behind you.
Steve Smith:
Yeah. Well, it’s been a labor of love. I’ve learned more about technology in the last three weeks than I’ve known in the last five years. There’s been some benefit that’s come out of all this. Okay.
Steve Smith:
Just as an opener, just tell us a little bit about PR security systems and how you got into this line of work.
Dave Oates:
Sure. I’ve been in the PR business for about 25 years. I started actually as a Navy officer, turned Navy public affairs officer. The bottom line is that crisis PR, which is now my specialty, has been something I’ve done since the beginning because in Navy operations something always happens that draws the media attention. It could be hot war environments. It could be accidents. It could be sailors and Marines, unfortunately, the few that behave badly in a port of call, or something you just get wrapped up in, an international event and you wind up being center stage for that.
Dave Oates:
When I went to the private sector about 20 years ago, I started as a promotional PR guy working for a couple of agencies. I was the marketing director for a software company and hung up my own shingle about 13 years ago. But over the last several years, I have focused exclusively on crisis PR because this environment, the social media and internet conference, makes not only anybody a broadcaster, but any organization essentially targets for negative publicity. Most of the time the negative publicity comes in the form of a bad online review, bad law, bad social media, and, oh, by the way, bad press. I come in and help organizations of all various sizes get through that particular incident, and hopefully, before it actually bubbles up to be able to set the narrative and context, put forth the right messaging that allows them to get back to normal operations as quickly as they can. It’s truly a privilege to do that for a lot of organizations who just find themselves in a situation that they hadn’t planned for, and ultimately help them get through it.
Steve Smith:
All right. With the weird times that we’re dealing with now, what are you finding out there? Who’s coming your way asking for help because of this very situation we’re dealing with.
Dave Oates:
Yeah. My schedule has gotten to the point where it’s literally almost 24/7. As we talk right now, I’m helping nine skilled nursing facilities throughout the State of California deal with some pretty daunting COVID outbreaks. I’ve got one as far South as Huntington Beach and the farthest north are three in the Bay Area, Alameda, East Bay, Castro Valley, as well as San Jose. In addition to that, I’m helping some retailers who are having to lay off staff and convert a lot of their business online, even more so than they had before and communicating that to the public.
Dave Oates:
I’m also getting a lot of inquiries and supporting a lot of nonprofits, a lot of mom-and-pop shops, a lot of organizations that just find themselves in a situation where they need to communicate a lot of different things to their audiences in order to not only preserve business but primarily preserve the relationships because at some point this is going to end. The question is, any business relies on relationships. I don’t care if you sell a widget on Etsy or you’re an independent florist in Lake Forest, you have relationships. To be able to communicate and keep those relationships going until you get back to normal is going to be key. I get them from all over the place right now.
Steve Smith:
All right. You and I have talked about this topic before, and I remember you saying that managing a crisis from a PR standpoint is always more successful the earlier you get ahead of the problem. But we both know that people, in general, aren’t looking ahead, they kind of wait for things to hit them right in the face. When you get involved in these things, how far are people into the crisis by the time you show up?
Dave Oates:
Hey, I wish I could tell you that they call me when something is bubbling up that somebody brought onto the desk. Maybe it’s an employee claim against the supervisor, or maybe it’s an errant rogue, a Yelp review. Maybe it’s a poor customer service call that somebody threatened to go on their blog or talk about them on Instagram. I wish I could tell you that’s when I get called because that’s when I ideally want to get called when something is possible. Then you develop, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s what we’re going to say. Maybe you find some opportunities to start conveying messages either directly to that individual who feels disenfranchised or prepare for what can be sort of a cascading event.
Dave Oates:
But in all candor, eight out of 10 times I get called after that blog or posts gets posted, after that Yelp review is going live, after Google indexes a blog post and it’s now in the top page of a search for your company or yourself as the owner, or media is calling you asking for comment because they’re about ready to run a story, because that person you allegedly inflicted some harm, either intentionally or just by default, has now gone onto the press. That’s when I get the call.
Dave Oates:
You can still help them by being able to convey the messages, responding to queries, come up with a strategy to not only address that one particular audience that’s inquiring but all the other audience you have, your employees, your customers, your partners, your investors. But it just costs more, and it takes more time, because somebody else has gotten the drop on a narrative. Somebody else has set the parameters of the discussion, and it just costs more in terms of time and resources to get that narrative tool. So ideally, I like to do it before it becomes an issue because you can usually be able to set the narrative, either before the other person does or be able to respond right away when it happens.
Steve Smith:
All right. If you’ve been in business any length of time, you just kind of know that being in business and serving the public for whatever channel of the industry you’re serving, kind of comes with risks, the risk of being sued, the risk of getting a bad review. Even though nobody wants a bad review, if you’ve got several hundred either in Yelp, or Google, or places like that, you kind of tend to live with it sometimes, and maybe you don’t recognize that it’s something that could mushroom on you. How do you help business owners understand what to look at to figure out, okay, this is just something I can respond to, and it’ll just get pushed down over time, or this is something I can’t let go.
Dave Oates:
Yeah. Because I get the idea that owners don’t necessarily want to respond to every time somebody squawks about something, because then you’re giving them credence. But I would submit to you, you’re going to have to look at that a little more carefully, because whether they like it or not, the press, the Orange County Register, KNBC, KFI, KNX 1070, none of those have the same clout as they used to. People aren’t consuming news reports like they did 20, 30 years ago. They may be still going to those sources, but they’re relying also on influential bloggers, organizations’ tweets, a friend, word of mouth, or things like that. I think what people don’t understand is things like Yelp will have as much credibility with an audience as a news report. Like it or not, that’s the reality of the situation.
Dave Oates:
Let’s take the scenario you talked about, a bad online review. I think organizations should have a strategy, not only for online reviews but other social media, to constantly monitor that. There are systems you can put in place. There are people you can hire, very nominal fees, or at least what you should do is Google yourself on a periodic level, on a periodic basis. Google your name and Google your business’s name and see what comes up. You’ll be surprised when you get alerted to things that you didn’t know about, and when you do, I think you’re able to respond accordingly. I recommend this.
Dave Oates:
I’ll take the one specific question on Yelp reviews. If somebody writes a poor Yelp review, the thing about that is you don’t necessarily need to try to get rid of that review, especially as you said, if you’ve got plenty of other reviews that sing your praises, nobody hits it out of the park every time. If you got one error on one, the thing you should do is you should reply to that person to say, “Hey, we’re sorry we didn’t meet your expectations. We’d love to have a conversation with you about it.” Provide a generic email, so not your own personal one, but like info app, whatever. “We’ll know it’s you. We’ll look for that. We’d love to have a conversation and see what we can do about it.”
Dave Oates:
Now I’ll take it one step further because I always get this question. People will say, “Well, yeah, but that Yelp review is bogus. That’s actually a competitor. We know it’s a competitor, or this person never stepped foot in my physical shop or my virtual shop, never was a customer.” Well then, you can call them out on that, but you just have to do it in a very nice, empathetic way. “Hey, we’re really sorry we didn’t meet your expectations. By the way, I don’t have a record of you being a customer. Would you be able to send me some info to this email address, and let’s do that?”
Dave Oates:
Again, you’re doing it not necessary to get rid of that review or to turn the opinion of that reviewer around. What you’re doing is you’re telegraphing to the other hundreds of people who reviewed your site, but also the thousands of people that are going to that review site and saying, “Hey, we’re trying to take action. We know we didn’t meet the mark. We have some questions on the validity of this one, but it doesn’t matter. We want to take care of everybody.” Most people give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. It’s not necessarily that you have a bad review, it’s how you responded, or more to the point, how you didn’t respond to it.
Steve Smith:
All right. I know today this is not new. This has been going on for the last 10, 15 years, that more and more of your major news outlets are combing social media and looking for stories. They’re just looking for news blurbs. I listen to a few radio stations throughout the day, and they always do this. They go to the news. Some of these stories are wacky or odd, but they’re just filling air time. Some of your local TV stations kind of do the same thing, usually at the end of the segment.
Dave Oates:
Right.
Steve Smith:
To me, it’s not unusual if you had something brewing out there, that somebody with a bigger audience could grab and run with it. If you’re presented with that kind of a situation as the owner of the business in question, and all of a sudden you see something that doesn’t speak well to you on the local news, KTLA 5 or something like that, what should you do and what shouldn’t you do?
Dave Oates:
It’s a great question, sort of the tail wagging the dog and speaks to the point that I made before, that the traditional news organizations are no longer the dominant intermediary between the information and the consumer. They’re getting it by a multitude of sources, of which the medium might be dependent on your demographic, one only one of those sources. What happens now, as you point out, the news is sort of chasing their tail by looking at social media and looking at them as credible sources, right?
Steve Smith:
Right. Yes.
Dave Oates:
They might be like, “Hey, there are three trends over here that say company X, the local restaurant in Lake Forest just served something that was horrible, or their floors were dirty, or some silly something.
Steve Smith:
Somebody found a finger in their soup or something like that.
Dave Oates:
Right. I think the first thing that you do, if you see that on television, well, okay, recognize the fact that you’ve ended this thing royally. The first thing you should do is monitor your social media posts. There are hashtags you can put in place. We do consult for that. What are the kinds of things that you set up monitoring-wise, just so you know if somebody’s tweeting about you or somebody posting something on Facebook. That aside, now you’re in this position, what do you do about that? The first thing you want to do is you want to reach out to the news station, and you want to provide a statement that says, “We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. We did not know it exists. We did not follow social media. This is what we do. We’re really appreciative that you brought that to our attention.”
Dave Oates:
In an empathetic and action-oriented way, tell how you are going to address this, even if you’re not even sure it’s true, how you’re going to investigate that, and how you’re going to actually take action to make sure that that person at least is heard, and you’re going to see if there’s something that you need to do to fix it. The two cardinal rules in any crisis PR position. I don’t care if you’re a skilled nursing facility dealing with COVID outbreaks, or you’re a local restaurant that just got hammered on Yelp for some silly reason, you show empathy and action. Again, by doing so, you don’t have to make culpability if there’s none to be made.
Dave Oates:
If there is, own up to it. The bad news doesn’t get better with age and act like George Washington that chopped down the cherry tree, yadda, yadda, yadda. But if you didn’t, at least show empathy that you said, “Hey, we recognize somebody’s not happy with that, and we’re going to take action to find out exactly what happened and see if we can rectify it, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Most people will give you the benefit of the doubt. People get angry on social media in the same way they get angry in the public. They feel like they’re being disenfranchised. They feel like they’re not being heard, and they feel like they have no say in the matter. If you can show that empathy and action [crosstalk 00:16:47].
Steve Smith:
Well, I can imagine some of the biggest fears of people who have retail businesses or businesses where their customers come and visit them, is that somebody is going to walk into your shop, and something’s going to happen, and all of a sudden everybody within a 10-foot radius pulls their cell phone out and starts collecting video. Eventually, that’s the stuff that ends up at these local stations. I’ve even heard of news radio programs where they post the stuff on their website to get people to go to their website. Phone videos become viral, whether it’s legitimate or not.
Dave Oates:
This is as much of a broadcasting mechanism as the six o’clock news. I think that needs to be understood by every single business owner, executive, and person who is in the public eye. Anybody can turn this thing into a broadcast mechanism, and I say any organization of any size can go from hero to zero in an Instagram post. Why? Because I have the same power. I do video blogs all the time, and I know you do this. I do them at least half the time, if not three-quarters of the time, on my phone. I think that’s the thing that people need to worry about. You have to look at everybody who comes into your virtual or physical front door as not only a customer but also as a potential broadcaster.
Dave Oates:
Really, this isn’t anything new for businesses. We all rely on word of mouth as our primary means of successful marketing. It’s the most effective and efficient. Get somebody who had a positive experience from you singing your praises and bringing in three others. Similarly though, these same people now through technology, if they don’t have a good experience or feel like they’ve been disenfranchised, they don’t tell three people, they tell 10 people, so you have to look at it that way. You have to have your communication strategies at the ready. It could be as simple as just acknowledging that somebody’s not happy and try to rectify it. It doesn’t mean you’re going to solve it every time.
Dave Oates:
Again, maybe you’re not even trying to dissuade that individual from being ticked off, but you’re trying to telegraph to everybody else that they talked to, that this is the exception to the rule. We’re doing our best. Some people you can’t please. Most people will put it in the context, particularly if you also at the same time get people to sing your praises by just being a good business, and they’ll post good stuff on Instagram, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, whatever the proper outlets are, and sing your praises.
Steve Smith:
All right, Dave, look, this has been some really great information. If there are businesses out there now that are watching this, and they have questions about things that maybe they’re just getting a feel this potentially could go bad, do you take calls from people just to kind of help them vet things, and figure out do they need to worry or maybe not?
Dave Oates:
Absolutely. I mean, look, you and I are both entrepreneurs. We’ve got our own gig. From one entrepreneur to another, there’s a business owner, business executive. I don’t care what size or scale. I love what I do. I love being able to provide a voice to companies who feel they’ve lost it, or being drowned out by an opposing viewpoint. Yeah, this website is public relations, that’s plural, publicrelationssecurity.com. David Oates, you can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and in Twitter. I’d be only too happy to be of service, even if it’s just a quick 10-minute phone call. There are businesses out there that feel besieged, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Steve Smith:
Right. Well, listen, thanks for being on today. I knew this was going to be a good topic. I’m just glad you had the time and the willingness to speak to the people that we’re broadcasting to, because whether they need it now or not, I think it’s really good insurance to just have an awareness of what’s going on that has your name attached to it out on the Internet.
Dave Oates:
I’m glad I had backup WiFi since the first one seems to be sticking out. This has been great. Thanks for the time. I appreciate it.
Steve Smith:
You’re quite welcome. You have yourself a safe and enjoyable weekend.
Dave Oates:
Yeah, be well. Be safe out there, everybody! Thanks.
Steve Smith:
All right. Folks, thanks for tuning in today. Next week we are going to have a whole brand new lineup. We’ve got some great guests coming. Probably the feature one for the week is Senator John Moorlock, who’s going to be talking to us on Tuesday about things that are going on at the state level. I’m going to be really, really happy to be talking with him and kind of getting his insights from more of a legislative standpoint.
If you’d like to show today, tag us, share us, give us your feedback because we’d love to hear what you think. If there are certain topics that you’d like us to talk about, let us know because we’re always willing to add them to the schedule. But between now and Monday, have a great weekend. Be safe, enjoy yourself. We’ll talk to you soon. This is Steve Smith from Open for Business.
