Ben Goldacre VS Rentokil, Part II

Or, The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.

If you haven’t heard about Rentokil’s fantastically sensationalist PR story about cockroaches on public transport, then you can read my overview here or Ben Goldacre’s overview here. This article is about how badly they dealt with the negative PR storm in its wake.

So you write a press release about a new bug killing technology you’ve developed, send it out to a few journos and then follow it up with some specific figures about the number of cockroaches on train carriages. You present the figures as being real, actual figures about the number of actual cockroaches you found on an actual train (they were not) and this is printed as fact. Then a relatively well known debunker of bad science tweets you asking to see the figures from your study. Knowing full well that your figures are a massive over-estimation reached by the most absurd model and not actually ‘real’ figures at all, you ignore him.

Unfortunately, the relatively well known debunker is Dr. Ben Goldacre who has 30,000 followers on twitter. So Rentokil, I thought I’d give you a few pointers.

Lesson 1 – What do you do when you have created an outrageously sensationalist PR story, presented over-inflated pretend figures, produced from the most unlikely model known to man, told everyone they are real figures collected from a real field study and then someone famous for attacking such behaviour with religious zeal who has 30,000 dedicated followers, a Guardian column and No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling book called Bad Science challenges them?

A: Don’t ignore them. They will not go away. They will re-tweet and re-tweet and re-tweet, making sure as many people as possible know what you have done and that you are ignoring him. Those people will then re-tweet it to others who have never heard of Ben, but are damned sure to be following him now. Don’t believe me? Look here.

Lesson 2: What do yo dou when a famous investigative journalist, broadcaster and author criticises you in front of an audience of 30,000 people (likely more – by this point, Dave Gorman and Neil Gaiman are re-tweeting, who collectively have over 1.5 million followers. EPIC FAIL) and you eventually get around to responding to him a day later and but haven’t actually given him the specific information he asked for?

A: Well, first of all don’t tweet this

Good Morning @bengoldacre, I hear that @Rentokil UK’s PR Agency got back to you. Sorry it took so long; corp wheels can turn slowly!

Are you kidding? You blame ‘corp wheels’ for taking an age to get back to him, when you haven’t even told him anything at all?! Fail.

Don’t pretend the issue is happily resolved when you know full well you haven’t answered his question but in fact have fobbed him off. This = more bad PR. Perhaps it would even have been prudent to make note of the fact that said journalist had in fact been tweeting for the last 12 hours about the fact you still hadn’t answered his questions and had fobbed him off.

Rentokil posted this apology on their website at 7.43pm on Friday 12^th March, 29 hours and hundreds of posts after Ben’s first tweet. That’s 29 hours of real time, continuous bad PR to a very large audience. Google ‘Rentokil’ now and a lot of that bad PR is on the first page.

Social Media can be a really useful tool in brand management; it’s a great way to engage with your market and manage your brand image in real time. If a negative message about your company is spreading like wildfire across twitter do not take 29 hours to respond to it. Do it immediately and less tweets will be made, the story hopefully goes away quicker and you limit the damage. Instead potentially millions of people across the world saw the whole exchange and it was so sensational Ben used it as his Guardian column on Saturday 13^th Match (Saturday Guardian readership is over 350,000 people. Oops).

Part of brand management is owning up when you’ve done something hideous and mitigating the inevitable damage, not putting your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, saying “LALALALA – I CAN’T HEAR YOU” and hoping it goes away (besides, when you did eventually own up you still withheld an awful lot of information – read the comments on the press release. Very funny.) News stories don’t end up as chip shop paper anymore; they are filed by Google forever to appear in searches for you. Chances are we’ll all do it at some point and after writing this the fates will probably move to make me fall far from my high horse in punishment, so lets hope I at least have the sense to take my own advice!

I think we can all agree that this was an epic social media fail, but what makes it a Super Massive Epic Fail? Well, it’s this. Cockroach-gate unfortunately brought immediate attention to Rentokil’s appalling social media strategy, which they decided to post online (FAIL so hard I fell off my chair); in which they not only outline their ‘strategy’ of employing worst-practice methods of social media PR (like Twitter spamming), they also acknowledge that some people find this rude and intrusive and are (rightly) angry about it. They go on to state that those people are wrong to feel that way and that their course of action is a good one (even though people have left comments explaining that this goes against twitter’s code of practice and is BAD PR!). It’s not so good if you’re annoying the market genius. This combination is why I am awarding you the prize for The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.

So guys, with the fates duly tempted watch this space for an embarrassing social media fail of my own to (hopefully) honestly own up to.