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Friday, 31 August 2007

Best advice on scandals ever from TNH

In the Making Light thread on the SFWA's debacle where Andrew Burt used a bot searching for 'Asimov' to issue DMCA takedown notices willy-nilly, sideswiping Cory, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden gave the clearest, most compact advice on handling net PR disasters ever:
  1. Get out there and say something, fast.
  2. Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
  3. Explain what you're doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.
  4. Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You've screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every one of those pairs of eyes is a person who knows how to Google.
  5. Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what's going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too.

Also, James D. MacDonald said:

While one should not attribute to malice anything that is adequately explained by stupidity, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Update: Teresa made it a post, so now it has it's own intelligent comments.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 22:21
Labels: advice, cock-up, PR, scandal, web

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