How 5 Startups Managed a PR Crisis Including Snapchat, Airbnb, and Slack — Pressfarm
Evan Spiegel- Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity — Jun 2015
When you have a PR crisis what do you do? All companies are usually faced with this question eventually. What happens when your good company’s name is about to be dragged through the mud ruining all the credibility you have been building for several years? There are a few tips to manage a PR crisis for startups. However, even more elaborate is using a few cases to show that no PR crisis is irredeemable. 90% of the time, your good name can be salvaged; albeit with a few bruises sometimes.
Here are 5 startups that handled a PR crisis with honesty and directness that we can learn from:
1. Zenefits
Zenefits is a Saas platform that provides a platform for companies to manage their HR facets — from benefits and compliance to payrolls and performance management. The company also earns commissions for selling health insurance covers to these businesses that use their platform. On 5 thFebruary 2016, Buzzfeed broke a story about Zenefits flouting insurance rules by brokering health insurance without being legally licensed. Of particular concern was the Washington State law that required every insurance broker to have a license. Zenefits had 56 employees doing insurance deals in the state, 44 of whom were selling insurance without the required license.
What the Buzzfeed story also showed was that the presiding CEO at the time, Parker Conrad, apparently encouraged the act. In responding to this major PR crisis for the startup, the company’s board immediately fired the CEO and Founder. He was replaced by David Sacks.
In a letter to the Zenefits customers, the new CEO apologized to existing customers and said “We want to address any concerns you may have and let you know what we are doing about the situation.”
The news from Buzzfeed nearly crippled the company as it continued to create a media frenzy. It was definitely not something the company would recover from by sending out apology emails. Since then, the company has laid off over 45% of its workforce from a team that was bloated by over 1,600 employees. It is this over hiring and attempts to scale too fast that had made it impossible to control the workforce leading to the claims of fraud. In addition, the founder had written a software program that helped the salespeople to flout insurance requirements in some areas.
David Sacks who was also a former COO for the company put license compliance in place, negotiated settlements with states, and released a new version of the core product. He stepped down for other reasons later. However, his immediate addressing of the problem helped Zenefits stay afloat. It lost very few customers.
The company is still recovering its brand image but what the approach by David Sacks showed was that Zenefits was committed to change, and would stop at nothing to ensure the change was achieved no matter the costs. This has since earned the company applauds in the media from time to time.
2. Snapchat
In 2014 December, some private emails of Michael Lynton were leaked. He is an investor and the serving Chairman of Snap, who are the makers of Snapchat. At the time he was also the CEO of Sony Pictures. Among the leaked emails were some between the CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, and Michael. These emails had information about Snapchat’s strategies and upcoming features, as well as financial details and partnerships.
The media went into a dance. At the time, it never seemed like Evan Spiegel was a darling of the press. There was just too much negative media attention on his personal life. This leak fueled the fire even more.
Despite the bad publicity, Spiegel wrote a very heartfelt letter to Snapchat’s employees. He apologized that Snapchat’s secrets and future plans had been exposed and violated by the hackers and the media. He acknowledged that those were company secrets that had leaked, and enforced the idea that it was okay to have secrets as a company.
“We keep secrets because we get to do our work free from judgement — until we are ready to share it. We keep secrets because keeping secrets gives you space to change your mind until you’re really sure that you’re right,” he said. “It’s not fair that people get to take away all the hard work we’ve done to surprise our community, family, and friends.”
This letter was felt very closely by a lot of Snapchat’s employees. It even spilled to the public. One thing about Snapchat’s users is that they absolutely love the platform. They loved the letter by Spiegel and got to know the vulnerable side of this CEO that had never been seen before.
Eventually, the crisis didn’t matter at all because the media began speaking highly of Evan Spiegel’s letter and his personality. This was a PR crisis that got addressed immediately by attempting to create a connection between the CEO and employees. It succeeded. Today Snapchat is thriving more than ever.
3. Slack
On November 23 rd2015, users of Slack went on Twitter to protest that the service was down. They even created a hashtag for the protest codenamed #slackdown. In the hours that followed, Slack learnt of the outage for some customers via Twitter and went to address the issue. They tweeted a message for each twitter user who was tweeting via the hashtag.
In total, they sent out over 2,300 personalized messages for every Slack customer who was having an issue. Eventually, in a crisis that would have gone negatively viral for Slack, it went well and they got over 3,000 new followers on Twitter that day, that’s 7x the number of followers they get on any normal day.
Their approach was very direct. They usually have an internal tool built specifically to let them know of any customer support issues that come through Twitter. They were therefore able to quickly know about the hashtag and get on with addressing the issue. Their major PR win was reaching out to each and every user with a personalized message to resolve their problem. Sending out over 2,300 messages in a day on Twitter is no mean feat even for a startup that big. Lots of bigger companies could never do it. This was a show of their commitment towards ensuring their customers have the very best support they can offer.
It is not by accident that they were able to handle things so well. They had planned for it. They knew someday something might happen and cause them a stressful workday. A part of that plan included a special social media clean up group. When that service outage happened, this strategy and group came into place and were tweeting incredibly thoughtful, kind, remorseful, and funny messages towards every user that had a complaint. They were able to turn the tide that day in their favour because of planning in advance for a crisis.
4. Buffer
Buffer is a Saas solution that enables users to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. On October 26 th2013, the company had one of its most challenging PR crisis. The platform had been hacked and details of thousands of social media accounts for customers stolen. The hackers then used the stolen information to post spam messages on social media. The issue was so serious that Buffer had to shut down their platform to allow for investigations to continue.
In response, the CEO and co-founder, Joel Gascoigne, created this blog post to address the issue.
To start off he apologized and acknowledged that indeed the Buffer service had been hacked. Additionally, he provided assurances that no payment information was stolen, and the only compromise was the social media pages belonging to the users.
From his initial and immediate response, customers were informed of every step that was being taken to handle the breach. From working with Facebook, AWS, and Twitter to continuously updating users about the progress of the investigation on the blog, and Buffer’s Facebook and Twitter, everything was brought under control.
Eventually the company was able to restore the service after over 9 updates. They also worked to seal loopholes to ensure the chances of this happening again are totally minimized.
For a young company that was just getting into the game, their service being forced to shut down and thousands of customer details at risk, they handled this quite well. It was facilitated by the acknowledgements and constant updates.
5. Airbnb
Airbnb is an online marketplace that lets people rent out their spare rooms or properties to guests. As you can imagine, this has a lot of risks for the guests and hosts alike because you are never too sure about the person you will be hosting or the person that will host you. This has led to lots of firefighting by Airbnb every time there is a crisis. Almost all crises on Airbnb’s platform lead to lots of social media attention.
However, Airbnb seem to have learnt a lot from the past about managing a PR crisis. They now quell most fires within no time and receive adequate trust from lots of their users. For instance, most recently a new story broke out on Twitter where guests had been treated in a discriminatory manner, rudely talked to and even abused when they arrived at the place where they were to stay for their vacation. There is a thread and videos that include the host verbally abusing the guests with claims that she did not feel safe in her home because she was hosting black guests.
Last night, a group of friends and I reserved an Airbnb in NYC, and encountered a racist and rude host.
When we arrived to our @Airbnb, we were harassed several times before being thrown out at 2 am. Her reasonings were because she felt unsafe, she assumed we were going to
- TooN (@Kartoon_1911) June 1, 2019
Airbnb quickly got down to the issue and got involved in the thread. Their initial response was an apology before even getting down to the real issue. They also highlight an Anti-Discriminatory Policy that they have for their company.
We’re so sorry to hear about this, Airbnb does not condone discrimination in any way. You can view our Anti-Discriminatory Policy here, https://t.co/folRu1quOC. Could you also provide us with more details regarding your experience via DM? We’d like a closer look. https://t.co/WCQEFGIlXC
- Airbnb Help (@AirbnbHelp) June 1, 2019
After looking at what went down, Airbnb finally decides to terminate the host from the platform entirely and even helps the guests find a new place to stay.
The language is unacceptable and has no place in the Airbnb community. We’ve removed the host from our platform and are supporting the guests with a new place to stay. We’re thankful to them for bringing this to our attention so we could take action.
- Airbnb (@Airbnb) June 2, 2019
This will not be the end of this kind of issues for Airbnb. However, the team seems to have understood how to deal with the issue.
They have policies to show that they understand the nature of their platform and all vulnerabilities that the business has. They have foreseen these issues and created policies on how to deal with them.
Their initial answer which was a very immediate response is an apology. They do not attempt to dismiss the guests or defend the host. They promise to take action after receiving more details on the story. The company then investigate and find that indeed the hosts were verbally abused and discriminated upon. They take action by totally banning the host from the marketplace. They then make it known of what actions have been taken to help the guests find another place to stay; and by banning the host ensure the chances of this repeating is minimized.
In all these 5 scenarios, each of the companies dealt with their crisis in a very direct, transparent, and honest manner. This is what helped them to survive. For companies like Airbnb where their good name might come into question from time to time, their PR crisis strategy is in place to ensure things do not escalate. All the same, every startup can learn something from how these crises were handled in order to formulate proper PR crisis management strategies for the future.
We know it is not always easy to get this done, which is why startups should embrace hiring a PR firm like Pressfarm (disclaimer: that’s us) to cater towards their pressing needs and help formulate a crisis strategy.
Originally published at https://press.farm on June 4, 2019.
