Amazonfail and issues management: how not to deal with social media crises

His hands are sweaty and his chest is tight. He's been here dozens of times, though not in this particular medium, but it's still a thrill: that old crisis feel.

He leans forward and taps in the messages, slapping the enter key after each one:

#Amazonfail Hi this is Max Schleffer, VP at Amazon. My profile is here: http://ti.ny/url.
#Amazonfail We don't know what's going on re the deranking issue, but we're working to find out.
#Amazonfail We're listening to all your comments. Please keep talking to us.

He sits back as the tidal wave of angry response swells online. In the office, seven people are desperately trying to get his attention, waving their smartphones at baseball-bat speeds. He has no idea how or why this issue came up; he suspects the answer is scattered among disconnected parts of the Company's internal bureaucracy, none of whom are at their best over the long Easter weekend. Another thought comes through the adrenaline and he taps again:

#Amazonfail I'll post updates at least once per hr till this is sorted. Please understand it may take some time.

Thank god for coffee, he thinks. This is going to be a 10 litre day easy.

The above never happened. Specifically, it never happened about 2-3 hours into the full groundswell of the Easter weekend #Amazonfail ruckus, as twitter exploded with anger over Amazon's apparent removal of many LGBT titles from aspects of their ranking system. I'm not going to go over the facts, such as they're known at this point: you can find coverage here, here, and here. But in a former life I worked in issues & crisis management, and there's much to be learned from Amazon's mishandling of the communications aspects of #Amazonfail.

1. When your communications crisis hits, join the conversation FAST.

When a rumour gains critical mass and becomes a public outcry, anger and half-truths spread at incredible speed. That speed used to be measured in daily news cycles, the time taken by journalists to notice events and report on them. Even with lazy coverage and questionable fact-checking, the news cycle was usually a moderating influence on just how out of hand things could get. Good crisis managers knew to respond quickly, preferably within the first news cycle after a story broke, getting facts and official responses out into the public eye while reporters chased 'both sides' of the story.

Social media, particularly twitter, is a fundamental game-changer for this, far more so than older web-based reporting or blogs. The 'incredible speed' of rumours acquires a whole new meaning, and there aren't even the shreds of quasi-journalistic structure to moderate it. Instead of issuing a 'public response' to a 'media problem', a good crisis manager now needs to immediately join the public conversation. Given that #Amazonfail gained traction as a twitter surge (the actual issue has been popping up for months), Amazon's delayed handling of it via old-school outlets such as the New York Times smacks too much of the 'media cycle' approach. A high-ranking Amazon rep should have jumped into twitter fast, accepted that they were going to get abused, but nonetheless opened a channel for direct communication. This should have been done as soon as it was apparent that #Amazonfail had become an issue in the first place, not when Amazon felt confident that it knew what the cause was. Which leads me to...

2. Manage risk by talking (you are not a lawyer).

Corporate communications practice still borrows too often from the lawyer's game of say as little as possible. Don't incriminate yourself. Manage the risk by avoiding all possible exposure. In social media this is suicide. The risk of a misplaced public statement getting a company into legal trouble is real, especially in America: Microsoft's Larry Hryb encountered this in 2008 via, again, twitter posts. But the reputation risks incurred by saying nothing while rumours, anger, and half-truths gain momentum can be enormous too. Amazon presumably waited nearly 2 days to make their first public statement because they needed to figure out the facts on their end, and feared that premature comments might come back to bite them. But the twittermill moves too fast for that, and there are ways to enter the conversation without unacceptable legal exposure (like above).

At the end of the day, lawyers still do well by hunkering down and saying the absolute minimum necessary. Communicators do better to accept a certain amount of anger, emotion, and even potential legal risk by jumping in, listening, and talking to their audience. Then, as clear facts emerge, they get to help disperse them while countering half-truths and rumours from a position of strength.

3. Come to terms with bureaucracy, and buy a lot of coffees.

Some of the most maddening crises are created by the interplay of blind bureaucratic forces. The external public don't want to believe this, but it's true. Consider, for instance, these five things:

* A mid-level worker in an organisation creates a policy to address a specific issue that's come up.
* In 3 completely separate parts of the organisation, low-level workers apply that policy to different issues, with varying competence.
* As part of an internal restructure, an aggressive senior manager is moved to a new VP position, one he isn't familiar with.
* An external partner demands a shift in a technical aspect of the organisation's website.
* A new automated feedback system is put in place.

Kinda dull, right? Yet that combination, or a thousand variations on it, is the real cause of many media issues. Getting to the bottom of such a tangle, especially during a crisis, is painful. The classic stuff - CEO's a serial killer, large-scale fraud by an individual, etc – is actually easier in a communications sense, strange as that may sound. People, especially in angry public mode, are strongly conditioned to think that if something has gone wrong then a) it's someone's 'fault' and b) it's part of a larger evil plan. This is partly why a lot of 'public response' statements focus on the idea of a single error by an identifiable person – such as, in Amazon's case, a French employee having translation issues with metadata. By offering up a clear, slightly comical 'culprit', Amazon is defusing the impression of an intentional attack on their LGBT audience, but they're also diverting away from the more complex (and IMO much more likely) concept that #Amazonfail is the result of a web of policies, errors, and mishandlings. The real 'crisis' likely started months ago in dozens of unconnected places.

The only way to really prepare for such things as a crisis manager is to know the organisation top to bottom, maintaining personal relationships with as many people as possible on all levels.These are the people you're going to be calling at 2 am on Easter Sunday, desperate for their tiny piece of the puzzle that's assembling itself in your head. If they already know you, they're much more likely to give you genuine help. All real crisis management starts as risk management, and risk management starts with buying people coffees when there isn't a crisis happening. This also highlights the danger of having communications and PR as an external function run by a consultancy, rather than a core part of a business with a seat at the senior management table.

#Amazonfail (this phase at least) ended up with a company giving a classic old-media response to a public outcry. The potential to enter the conversation early, manage risk by talking, and give an honest public accounting of their own systems has been passed by, which I think is a shame. Someone, somewhere, is preparing detailed notes on #Amazonfail as a social media management test case: I wonder who will learn from it, and who won't. We're all going to find out, of course, and pretty damn soon. I've got my 10 litres of coffee ready and waiting.