Source:
https://www.podbean.com/eau/pb-2qkac-14ebbf0

Don't let good intentions lead to unintended consequences in your PR efforts. In this episode, we discuss a recent well-meaning attempt by a CEO to address negative press that ended up creating more problems for the company. We highlight the dangers of speaking without consulting expert counsel and the need for CEOs to consider the impact of their words on both internal and external audiences.
Read the article in TechCrunch: Carta’s CEO reaches out to customers about bad press, alerting them to bad press.
 
Transcript
Michelle Kane (00:17):
Thank you for joining us on this episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves, people like me, Michelle Kane, with VoiceMatters, and as always, my wonderful co-host, Karen Swim of Solo PR Pro. Hi Karen, how are you on this fabulous Monday?
Karen Swim, APR (00:38):
Hey, Michelle. I'm doing great. In spite of the major temperature drop, it's freezing cold, but it's okay. I'm good. I'm so good having a great moment. How are you?
Michelle Kane (00:49):
I'm well, thanks. Yeah, the fall crisp is finally arriving. It's a little gloomy today, but that's okay. Our morning was actually brightened up by this news from Carta. It was just a little astonishing. I think the theme of today would be CEOs who think they're helping, but they're also not. They're just not. This is why you have us. You might think that we're just fluffy, but we're not. PR pros are essential to your business.
Karen Swim, APR (01:22):
There could not have been a better ringing endorsement of why you should hire professionals to do your communications. I mean, I really just want to take this story and make copies of it and send it to every company in America and say, if you wondered why and as you're looking at your 2024 budgets, you're good reason to keep PR people on your team.
Michelle Kane (01:54):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's definitely a case of you may be the most well-meaning person in the world, however,
Karen Swim, APR (02:05):
So
Michelle Kane (02:06):
Set it up because you flagged this story for us. What's the lowdown of what exactly happened?
Karen Swim, APR (02:12):
So here's what happened. So Carta is a tech company in the Bay Area and the CEO Henry Ward, who seems like a lovely person, by the way, wrote a post about a piece of negative press that no one had seen. So of course no one had seen it. It was going to be a non-thing until he wrote a post about it and then went into great detail into all of their negative press in addition to just coming off really bad. So it's just a highlight of what happens when a CEO takes matters into his own hands. So he published a post of a long post that he had sent out to his employees, and again, keep in mind no one had seen the story, but then when the CEO comes out and puts something out, and his reason for putting this out is to help other CEOs who might be enduring the same thing.
All kinds of attention was created around the story that no one would've seen had he kept his mouth shut. So it went out there and I saw it in Mary Ann's TechCrunch newsletter, and then there was another story, and then it was a roundup, and then here we are on a Monday morning talking about it, not because we want to pile on this poor CEO who got it wrong, but because it's a great opportunity to share again what you really should not do and kind of work through what he was thinking and the many ways it all went bad for him.
Michelle Kane (03:46):
So step one is when you have the notion of writing a screed like this is to check with your comms team so they can weigh in on whether or not it's a good idea because we understand, I mean, who doesn't want to defend themselves? That's the first urge of, well, no, we didn't because in this litany of things, but as you said, this article that really no one had seen, it's got a whole new life now and now I'm sure most everyone in his realm has seen it, and it's just like that commercial where the liquid spills and you're going go
Karen Swim, APR (04:28):
Most definitely, and it's interesting. Here's the message that I would send to CEOs. We just had a similar situation in my real life work like this happend. It wasn't sexual abuse allegations or anything like that, but it was a potential crisis situation. Obviously, we were looped in immediately when we knew that this could be a situation. So we did what everybody does. We had a crisis plan around this particular thing. We work through create with the client, helping them to draft a statement that could be sent out to the media in the event that this news did become public, and we asked him to please share this with legal, to share it with the appropriate people so that it got blessed and it was ready to go in advance. The news did get out, a reporter did contact us. We were able to respond immediately. Not with no comment, not with, we can't talk about this, but with the natural statemen