Warthogs are Ugly but they are made of Bacon

In my last blog entry, “And the Devil take the Hind-Most,” I discussed some of the recent and most visible Social Media disasters. Today I’m going to discuss how to make an ugly situation work for you. Most of us are in at least one situation we consider capital “U” Ugly. For many of us that ugly situation is Social Media.

Say you have a successful company, built in a brick and mortar store, selling a physical product. You like your company, you like your product, and you like your customers. Suddenly your customers aren’t taking you seriously because you don’t have a website and a Facebook presence. Your coupon campaign in the Dollar Saver in the local grocery stores is no longer driving business because customers are “Googling” for coupons instead. Obvious solution? Get a Social Media presence, do it well, and retain your current customers. Starting a Social Media campaign when your concept of networking is shaking hands? That, my friends, is an Ugly Warthog. Where is the Bacon in this Warthog? Your Bacon is the potential for more customer exposure.

Let’s look at a bigger Warthog. Say your company was involved in a horrible accident that wasn’t entirely your fault. This accident involves a storage container you don’t own rupturing and spilling tons of your product. To make things worse your product is oil and the storage container is an off-shore drilling rig. Know who I’m talking about? Here is a link to re-cap if you’ve forgotten. So your company is involved in the worst environmental disaster in recent history. It is tough to imagine a bigger, uglier Warthog than that; no Bacon here at all right? After having a disaster named after your company it is time to declare bankruptcy and learn a new career. Or your stocks can be doing better than they were a year before the disaster. What? On Kapitall Wire Chris Lau does a great breakdown of BP’s stock history and an explanation of their current prospects as an investment; which are better than you’d expect.

How do you make that happen? You do things like this. After a few stumbles in the beginning BP took the best step they could in the wake of disaster. They owned the problem. Before you can get the Bacon out of a Warthog of any size it has to be your Warthog. In the age of information transparency is a thing whether you want it to be or not. If you were involved in a problem, however tangentially, people know. It is best to accept the blame for the problem and start fixing it. This is the first big step toward regaining the faith of your customers. Of course behind the curtain you can always pursue your legal options toward the real cause of the problem. BP didn’t own or run the oil rig that caught on fire and then sank, damaging the oil pipeline, Transocean did. In the news however it wasn’t the Gulf oil spill or the Transocean oil spill; it was the BP oil spill. BP initially tried to explain how it hadn’t been their fault, but got more pushback on rebranding the oil spill than they expected (re-gifting a Warthog rarely works). After that initial false-start BP accepted the problem as their own and set to fixing it. They paid millions of dollars in reparations to the people hurt by the disaster and paid millions more to repair the damage to the environment. Three years later they still have a website up raising the visibility of their ongoing efforts to help restore the Gulf of Mexico.

BP used a successful one-two punch in getting the Bacon from their Warthog. First, own the problem. Second, react quickly and visibly then follow through for as long as it takes. The follow through is very important and it is going to take time. Restoring the faith of your customers does not happen overnight, but if you are sincere in your efforts to repair the damage done it will happen. So BP’s strategy for solving the problem was simple and successful, but where’s the Bacon? The Bacon for BP and hidden in almost every public set-back you are going to face, is publicity. Ask any rock star, bad publicity is still free publicity and any publicity is good publicity. So BP was in the news for weeks about the disaster. They were also in the news for their efforts to solve the problem. After the news stories the viewers don’t always remember everything the story was about, but they remember the headline and they remember the names. If I was going to invest in an oil company right now I only know two names. Those names are Exxon and BP and I only know those because I heard them in the news. My research into investing in oil is going to start there simply because they are familiar. BP took a disaster and turned into a positive PR experience for them. They used it to highlight their commitment to safety and their public minded efforts. The Bacon for their efforts isn’t just continuing to exist as an oil company; it is being a successful giant in the oil industry.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a customer-service company, an IT company, or a solutions company; whether you are customer-facing or product-facing. If your Warthog is anything smaller than being implicated in helping cause the largest environmental disaster in recent history, and then having that disaster branded with you name, you can turn it into Bacon. The plan to render down your Warthog is a simple two-step process:

1)      Own the Problem.

2)      React quickly, react visibly, and follow through until the damage is reversed.

With effort and planning you can turn any ugly situation into a success for your company.  Moving forward you can leverage the lessons learned and the positive public exposure from your efforts to resolve the problem to empower a growth strategy for your company. Which is corporate-speak for: when you successfully solve a problem, or show real effort toward solving the problem you will get some goodwill back with the public. Use that momentum to help spur changes in your company to stop the same types of problems from happening again. There are no better stories than the long-shot victories and there is no better feeling than snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Will it be easy to turn an ugly situation into an opportunity for your company? No, because the easy way is to avoid disasters and Social Media faux pas. Will it be worth it to take the hit and own the problem and then put in the effort to solve the problem and regain your customer’s trust?  Always.

Before you go, here is an inspirational video to help you face those difficult situations in your own life:

References

BP p.l.c. (2013). Gulf of Mexico restoration [Webpage]. Retrieved from http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/gulf-of-mexico-restoration.html

Lau, C. (2013). Does Cost Containment Make BP and Ideal Energy Play Among Oil and Gas Stocks? [Article]. Retrieved from http://wire.kapitall.com/investment-idea/does-cost-containment-make-bp-an-ideal-energy-play-among-oil-and-gas-stocks/

Ocean Portal Team. (2013). Gulf Oil Spill [Article]. Retrieved from            http://ocean.si.edu/gulf-oil-spill