PR 101

The online classified advertising service Craigslist has been in the news a lot lately. None of those stories are the kinds of clippings that will be posted on the company bulletin board as morale builders. Accusations that people are using Craigslist as a high tech brothel, stories of a murderer who found his victims via the service, and the latest story: a woman raped because her husband solicited the assault on Craigslist.

If there were ever a situation that cried for a proactive crisis communications strategy, this would be the one. Yet, I have yet to see any evidence that Craigslist has one. Rather, the company seems to be responding on an ad hoc basis. That’s not a good idea and in the long run, it could hurt the company.

As a note, I use Craigslist sometimes. It is a very handy site for finding all kinds of things. I like it.

That being said, the way Craigslist reacts to stories of people committing murders by placing ads on their site or scammers finding victims through the site, is in my opinion, just plain wrong. All it does is attract grand standing politicians who want to make a name for themselves. What it could do is eventually attract some bulldog of a trial lawyer who sees deep pockets. Yeah, that lawyer might eventually lose the case, but think of the negative publicity, and the money Craigslist will spend defending itself.

Now obviously any site that has over 50 million unique visitors each month is going to attract some strange people. No question about that. Remember, until 2008 pornographic sites dominated the Internet. It took social media usages to knock porn off of the mountaintop.

It’s not Craigslist’s fault these people show up at their doorstep. However, the San Francisco-based website could be a whole lot more proactive when that fringe element uses the website to pull off a crime.

‘What makes Craigslist susceptible to crime is the perceived anonymity of the site; Trench Reynolds told the North Carolina-based News & Observer. Reynolds runs CraigsCrimeList, a site dedicated to tracking crime believed to be spawned by Craigslist

Reynolds said the most common crime connected to Craigslist is fraud or scams, with robbery second. Rapes have been connected to Craigslist solicitations, he said.

Craigslist does cooperate with authorities when it is alerted that someone has used the service to commit a crime.

Craigslist is also just coming off a battle where were several state attorneys general forced the company the curtail its erotic ad section. I suspect it is feeling more than a little bruised and battered.

Still, I cringed when I read the following statement from Craigslist spokesperson Susan MacTavish Best in the Columbus Dispatch: “she questioned whether it is standard practice for reporters to call, for instance, General Motors every time someone is injured in connection with a GM vehicle.”

Well, yeah they do when it shown that some action by General Motors or another auto company contributed to the accident. Any company that manufactures a product can tell you that.

Making a statement like that is not the way to handle a crisis. For that’s what this is from Craigslist – a crisis. So, I think rather than react every time some idiot uses the service for criminal purposes, the service should come up with a plan to prevent such things from happening.

What would I do is:

• No anonymous ads, period. If you read this blog regularly, you know I worked for newspapers for over two decades. No one could ever place an anonymous ad in a newspaper. The paper might agree not to use a name, but it always knew everything about the person placing the ad: name, address, phone number, bank information, etc. True papers got fooled sometimes, but it was rare. All it takes right now to post on Craigslist and reply to ads is an e-mail address.
• No personals period. Leave those to the alternative press and the dating sites. It seems people placing personal ads commit a lot of the crimes. To me, Craigslist is on-line sales forum, not a lonely-hearts site.
• Develop someway to review the ads. According to Craigslist’s website, it has 28 employees. I cannot imagine another web company, say Google, running with only 28 employees. Yeah, I know the whole privacy argument and most times I agree with it. But, there has to be some way to screen for the wackos and the weirdoes. I cannot believe there isn’t a search algorithm that could flag potentially dangerous ads for review by a staff member.
• Have a much better response when something does happen. A flack such Best should never be making a comment about a company. And I say that as a flack myself. Good public relations should leave no fingerprints. Either CEO Jim Buckmaster or founder Craig Newmark should be doing the talking.
• As I wrote in an earlier blog about crisis communications, just saying “our heart goes out to the victim” isn’t enough. If I were Newmark or Buckmaster,  I would sent up a fund to pay for the bills of victim’s who were the victims of a criminal using Craigslist. I know Craiglist’s attorneys will argue that is essentially admitting liability. I don’t think it is, and besides, it protects the brand platform. Or make contributions to victim’s rights funds, or over rewards for catching people who use Craigslist to commit crimes. Do something to show some empathy.

Now, I want to know what you think. I struggled with this blog. I am usually a First Amendment absolutist. I think nothing should be censored. However, the marketplace doesn’t agree. Companies have gone out of business for less. So again, let me know what you think.

I post this blog every Monday. If you have questions you would like me to answer, please email me. I am always looking for topics and input. My email address is in the next paragraph.

If you want to subscribe to this blog, please use the RSS feed link in the upper right hand corner.

In addition, please join my community. In the upper right hand corner, there is a widget marked Google Friend Connect. Please join. This is an example of cutting edge social media.

My background: I worked as a reporter for 25 years in central Illinois, upstate New York, suburban Detroit and Milwaukee. I now help clients with marketing communications through my company – JJC Communications LLC. If you want to know more about my company, and myself, click the link. It’s a cliché, but it’s true for me: no job is too big, no job is too small. I have worked with companies on the Fortune 500 list and I have worked with companies that have one employee. The service I provide is the same for all.

Email me at jjcole54@gmail.com

On May 28th, Google unveiled what it is billing as “the email of the future.”

Named Google Wave, the experimental project is the result of a multi-year initiative to reinvent digital communication by blending e-mail, instant messaging, and content sharing into something resembling a cross between Twitter, Facebook, and a standard email platform, according to Online Media Daily.

Google Wave, which is expected to be released later this year, will “combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication,” Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager at Google and the project’s co-founder said, Online Media Daily also reported.

What does this mean to those of us who use social media for marketing and public relations? It means it will be almost impossible to run an effective social media campaign without using Google applications. Merging Google Wave with Google Friend Connect means the “search engine” will become the colossus that will stand astride the web.

The core of social media is building communities. Think of Google as the place that provides all of the tools one needs to build those communities. I know of only one other place that provides as comprehensive a toolbox as Google does. It’s called Apple. Apple develops hardware and software for that hardware. Google is concerned with Internet applications. The two companies offerings dovetail quite nicely,

And Google and Apple are apparently working very closely together. One of Google’s new applications is called IGoogle. Coincidence, I think not. IGoogle aggregates such things as Google Latitude (which tells your contacts where you are), local weather forecasts, Gmail, sports scores, local events and a host of other information.

I first learned about Google approximately 10 years ago. A colleague at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel told me about this new search engine that was better than Yahoo. She said it was faster, simpler and wasn’t cluttered with ads. I tried it and I liked it.  At the time, I was one of the only people I knew who was using it. When I told people what search engine I was using, they laughed at the name. Now, Google dominates the Web.

Google is now so ubiquitous that the world “Google” has become a synonym for search. Consider these statistics for 2008:

Search Engine                         Share of Searches

Google                                            59.3 percent

Yahoo                                             16.9 percent

MSN                                                13.3 percent

AOL                                                 4.1 percent
Source: http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/135

As I have already said, Google is now far more than just a search engine. It is has made itself an essential part of working on the web.

Let’s look at some of its other applications:

• Google Friend Connect. Look at the right hand side of this blog. You will see a widget marked Google Friend Connect. Social media used to a fragmented experience. Some people were on Facebook, some were on Twitter, others used MySpace. What Google Friend Connect does is allow the linking of social media sites. As social media expert Simon U. Ford explains, Google Friend Connect is the pipeline running the under the web.
• Google Mail, or Gmail, provides email, instant messaging, and voice and video communication without launching a separate application. It is kind of a one-stop-shop for instant communication.
• Google Docs, which is essentially an on-line office application. Google Docs supports .doc, .xls, .csv, .ppt, .txt, .html, .pdf and other formats. What it means is anyone care share and edit documents, spreadsheets, web pages, etc. in real time. There is no need to email anything back and forth.
• Google sites allow the construction of rich websites. It can be used for something as complex as a company intranet or as simple as a family web page.

There are many other applications Google provides. As I already said, what Google has done is make it easier than ever to set up a social media campaign.

Let’s say you have launched a new product. Your customers like it. You create a Google site for those customers to go to discuss the product. You hook in Google Friend Connect to that site. Using Google’s blog app, you post a blog on that site where you discuss the product and give customers an opportunity to comment.

Some of the customers can record a video on YouTube about how much they like the product. Say link to that video on Facebook. Using Google Friend Connect, they become a fan of your site. Using the same app, they can link that Facebook video into the website in a seamless way.

And from the website, again using Google Friend Connect, the video can be linked to Digg, Plaxo, Technorati and a plethora of other sites. All of sudden, the potential exists for your video to be seen, and your blog to be read, by millions of people. And not to sound too much like a salesman, but Google made it all possible.

Will something else come along and knock Google off its pedestal? Who knows? All I know right now is that if you are going to run an effective social media campaign, you are going to need Google.

I post this blog every Monday. If you have questions you would like me to answer, please email me. I am always looking for topics and input. My email address is in the next paragraph.

If you want to subscribe to this blog, please use the RSS feed link in the upper right hand corner.

In addition, please join my community. In the upper right hand corner, there is a widget marked Google Friend Connect. Please join. This is an example of cutting edge social media.

My background: I worked as a reporter for 25 years in central Illinois, upstate New York, suburban Detroit and Milwaukee. I now help clients with marketing communications through my company – JJC Communications LLC. If you want to know more about my company, and myself, click the link. It’s a cliché, but it’s true for me: no job is too big, no job is too small. I have worked with companies on the Fortune 500 list and I have worked with companies that have one employee. The service I provide is the same for all.

Email me at jjcole54@gmail.com