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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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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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