How Social Media Can Quickly Escalate Small Problems Into A Public Relations Nightmare

When a low-level employee at Yelp publicly complained online about her low salary, the company responded quickly and decisively. She was summarily fired, at which point she went public about her termination. The story immediately went viral. There was much to chew on for the media; wealthy Silicon Valley elites terminating a common employee; gleeful schadenfreude of business owners, who have been the victim of less than kind Yelp reviews; and sympathy for a young woman struggling to make some very frayed ends meet. Most of all, there was the very odd paradox and spectacle of a company -- whose entire business model is reviews, its raison d'être -- handling a bad review very badly.

Yelp had allowed an HR problem to metastasize into an embarrassing PR problem. Incredibly, the presumably tech-savvy company seemed blissfully unaware of the power of social media and the speed at which information flies around the Internet. They had a problem and did the one thing that would be guaranteed to make it worse. It could not have been worse if Yelp chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman had been arrested egging the young woman's apartment or keying her car.

The people at Yelp would have done themselves a service by taking a page out of the playbook of Ivy Ledbetter Lee. Largely forgotten today, Lee is the father of modern public relations. Also largely forgotten is the 1906 Atlantic City Train Wreck. A major catastrophe of the era, a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train ran off a bridge in Atlantic City killing more than 50 passengers. Within minutes a crowd of thousands gathered at the site of the wreckage.

Lee, a former journalist, who was working for the railroad at the time, went against common practice. Rather than restrict reporters from the scene, he escorted them to the site of the tragedy and wrote what is said to be the first "press release." The writing was clear, factual, and not sugarcoated. Neither was it gruesome, nor sensational. The New York Times reprinted the release word for word.

Today, businesses of all sizes face similar public relations problems. Social media have literarily made everyone critics. A single disgruntled employee or dissatisfied customer can do genuine bottom-line damage with a compelling Facebook post or tweet. Never has it been so important for managers to address small problems early, before they become large public issues. Even the most trivial complaints can be amplified to an alarming degree by unresponsive staff or management. In some of the most extreme cases, patrons have pulled out phones and videotaped escalating disputes among employees, or photographed real or imagined shortcomings to post later online.

Conversely, a properly trained staff can turn these interactions into a positive for a company. Returning to the estimable Ivy Lee, facing a problem head on with a measure of creativity can not only deescalate a situation, but also can create a loyal customer. To state it another way: dealing with a dissatisfied customer is a sales opportunity. Staff and managers who treat complaining patrons as a problem to be disposed of quickly are missing the point, and a chance to build customer loyalty.

Granted, some discontented customers and employees cannot be satisfied. There are people with emotional problems and grudges, but the vast majority of those who complain are easily won over by employees with the proper training and companies with well-thought out protocols. At the end of the day it is almost always better to tackle a problem head on.