How to Not EVER Handle a PR Situation

While this situation may not be specific to music, it is a wonderful example of how to take a bad situation and turn it into a full on public relations nightmare.
To briefly fill in readers from around the world, there is a chain of restaurants in America called Applebee’s. Recently, a pastor dined at an Applebee’s establishment with a large party where the customary gratuity of 18% had been added on to the bill. All of that was fine, but one of the members of the party wrote on their check “I give God 10%, why should you get 18%?” and signed their name, Pastor so and so. Do keep in mind, this story is very convoluted and is becoming more so by the day, but from what Applebee’s headquarters is saying, the 10% the pastor gave was in addition to the 18% given by the group as a whole.
All of that is almost an aside, at this point. The interesting part began when a colleague of the person who served the pastor’s party took a photo of the receipt with the note from the pastor and put it online. It went viral quickly, and thus began a maelstrom of social media cacophony.
The server got fired from Applebee’s, which led to Facebook comments galore, tweets, blogs, editorials, and protests in every capacity imaginable. All of that is pretty standard when a company disappoints the public, but what Applebee’s did next is puzzling. They engaged in the arguments. They deleted negative posts. They acted the part of the irritated message board subscriber rather than playing the role of skilled social media/public relations specialist and now, they’re in far more trouble than they were to begin with.
While it may seem as though this has nothing to do with music, your band, or anything of the like, I absolutely disagree.
These situations will occur. People are very passionate about music; music that they love and music that they hate. It will be very easy to engage in juvenile banter when detractors bombard your twitter feed with negativity or people bash your new record on Facebook.
As someone who is quite reactive, I understand fully how difficult it is to resist the urge to immediately hit ‘reply’ and lambast those who you find irritating, but you can’t do it.
Take a break, breathe, walk away, break a pencil; do whatever you need to do to regain focus and perspective but do not engage in this type of behaviour. Ever.
An articulate, cogent, and controlled reply will be far more effective. It will also be far more irritating to your critics, which is a bonus.
Read the entire mess here