Issues happen. Mistakes are made. Reputations become tarnished. This is the way of the world, particularly when an error occurs after a company brand achieves leadership or a human being becomes famous. Sometimes gaffes or human nature takes precedence, and depending on how a company or person handles it, brands and reputations lag.
As we’ve seen time and time again, like any crisis situation, when the problem is avoided the blemish becomes more pronounced. But when it’s embraced reputation damage can be stopped, and in some cases, even improved.
Social media can be a great delivery mechanism in these situations, from blogs to videos. It can help reputation management with search, and defuse angry customers or perturbed fans.
Perhaps the most storied example of this is Dell’s magnificent use of its blog when laptop batteries were blowing up. By embracing the issue, Dell went a long way to resolving the matter and diffused a lot of anger pointed at the brand. In 2007, Steve Jobs accomplished a similar diffusion of brand angst when he acknowledged the iPhone price drop may have been an error with an open letter.
More recently, have you seen the now almost passe Lindsay Lohan video yet? A perfect example of someone whose reputation became tarnished and is now being rehabilitated through a humorous embracing of public mishaps. Lohan will never recover the sheen of her early stardom, but she can have an evolved reputation that takes her rough edges and wears them smooth with this kind of dialogue. Robert Downey, Jr. and MC Hammer are a great example of stars who recovered their reputations post crash.
LiLo’s publicist is genius. This is pretty much the only way that she can rise back to the top from an all time low. I mean she got dumped by Sam Ronson…ouch.
Saying you messed up is great and people will respect you for it more if you don’t lie about any of it. Lay it all out there, the public and people in general are pretty forgiving under those circumstances.
Absolutely. It’s hard to look in the mirror and say you haven’t made such errors in the past. So how can you judge someone else who owns their faults?
It’s brilliant.
Make all the jokes at your own expense, and it takes the wind out of the sails of those who would deride you.
To a degree, it’s just another nail in the coffin of the celebrity-leech industry. Ashton and Demi are showing the world how to put the paparazzi out of business, and Lindsey is undercutting the bloggerazzi.
Lindsay Lohan’s video still has me laughing. Great script and delivery. But I can’t help but think, “Why did they over-produce the thing, with so many cuts and camera angles?”
I think it would have been far more effective if it were shot on a webcam or a consumer-grade video camera, just like anyone else’s dating-site profile. One camera angle, and jump cuts. That would’ve been better at communicating “I’m just a human like you who, yeah, makes mistakes.”