Following on from Jane Wenham-Jones? article about poor companany PR I thought it might be worth pointing you in the direction of ?Twitter, shower gel and the art of terrible PR? where Duncan Bannatyne, Dragon?s Den star and owner of a chain of gyms shows us how not to conduct good PR when confronted by a gym customer, Matt Egan (also editor of PC Advisor), who was apparently ?slagging him off? on Twitter. Read the article to find out what he said. (We all know the trouble people can get into for quoted someone else. *Nod to ECR*)
For this he had Duncan Bannatyne calling his workplace to ask why he had been ?slagging him off? in public and mentioned the thinly veiled threat of what he thought of ?UK libel laws and Twitter?. Was this really the best way to go? Surely it?s yet another example of heavy-handed businesses taking things personally when in fact they should be doing their utmost to please their customers and accept that not everything they do is 100% perfect and that there is always room for improvement.
The result of this encounter is a lot of negative PR and Matt finishes off his article with this:
As it is, an opportunity to generate some good PR has been wasted.
A suitable outcome would?ve been to get back a reply from Duncan Bannatyne saying that the situation was getting sorted and that Bannatyne?s Gyms were sorry for any inconvenience caused. That would?ve been a great bit of PR in actually getting a tweet from a multi-millionairre, who takes the time to listen to his customers, and does something about it.
If businesses want to succeed then they should take things less personally, be a little less trigger-happy in threatening lawsuits, and instead look at where the real problems lie, and improve their customer service.
