Maclaren, a British high-end stroller company, currently faces a recall of 1 million umbrella strollers because the stroller’s folding hinge can amputate a child’s fingertips. According to reports, 12 children have already been injured.

Unfortunately, Maclaren fumbled their response to the recall. Here are a few things that Maclaren could have done differently.

1. Your website MUST work – We’re living in a digital world. When a PR storm hits your company, your customers aren’t going to call your 1-800 number. They’re going to hit your site to find out what’s going on. According to Time magazine’s story about Maclaren’s crisis, on Monday their website was basically inaccessible.

If you’re in charge of your company’s PR crisis plan, anticipate sudden, huge bursts of web traffic. If you wake up tomorrow with the FTC issuing a recall on one of your products, do you know exactly who you can call at your company who can immediately make the call to increase bandwidth and server capacity to handle the onslaught to your company’s website? If not, you need to think about this now – not when the storm hits.

Also, today, if you visited the Maclaren website, you’d be hard pressed to immediately find any information about the recall. There’s a link for recall in the top right-hand navigation menu of the page. The word “recall” is the same size font and color as the rest of the nav menu words. Why not have a prominent button that no one would miss – Maclaren Stroller Recall – We Want to Keep Your Child’s Fingers Safe – Please Click Here for Detailed Info

2. Twitter – It doesn’t really matter if you’re an active participant, just listening, or think that people on Twitter only talk about what they’re having for lunch. When a crisis hits, your customers, your critics, your evangelists, will be discussing your crisis on Twitter. And so should you. Certainly, you can also use traditional PR crisis tactics – press conferences, conference calls with reporters, 1-on-1 briefings with key reporters, but you should also be using Twitter aggressively to combat and negate the storm.

Maclaren execs could have first issued pro-active messages about the recall via Twitter – including a link to a webpage with all the info about the recall. Then, they could start engaging 1-on-1 with anyone mentioning or discussing the recall. If someone turns to Twitter to ask about a company’s recall, and then immediately gets a response directly from the company, that’s a whole lot better than an echo chamber of customers discussing, griping, complaining about a company’s recall with nary a tweet or word directly from the company.

3. Engage Your Critics ProActively – Moms and Dads these days are blogging about the trials and tribulations of parenthood. The Time article pointed out that many parenting bloggers were vocal in their consternation at the recall and Maclaren’s fumbled response. Here’s where the all-nighter comes in. In addition to an around-the-clock, proactive Twitter outreach strategy, Maclaren should have been engaging bloggers. First, they could have scoured the blogosphere for any mention of the recall and responded in the comments of the blog explaining the recall and what parents could do to order the stroller widget that fixes the hinge danger. But, Maclaren could have gone beyond responding via comments. They could have drafted a quick “blog response” to the crisis – an expansion of the blog comment text – and offered/suggested that bloggers run the item as a guest post. Would some bloggers have refused? Certainly. But some would have published it.

4. Facebook – Maclaren was right on in their Facebook strategy. Again, according to Time magazine, “An entry on the “Maclaren Baby” page instructs consumers to e-mail sales@maclarenbaby.com with their name, address, telephone number, stroller model and stroller Vin number.” This is good, proactive communication via social media. However, I wonder if Maclaren used the feature available to any Facebook page , “Send an Update to Fans.” If they didn’t, they should have. A simple update on a Facebook page can easily get lost in the stream of Facebook news. An update gives the message a little more Facebook urgency and attention.

Here’s the link to Maclaren’s website re: the recall:

http://recall.maclarenbaby.com/

What else could Maclaren done to get their message out yesterday when the FTC announced the recall?

Photo – bbaunch, some rights reserved

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I was talking to someone on Saturday who had been thinking about starting a podcast, but for whatever reason hadn’t reached a point where he was ready to pull the trigger. He did mention that he thought podcasting would be more comfortable for him, because he had tried writing a regular blog, and he was very self-concious about his writing ability, and he eventually lost steam on blogging due to his self-consciousness about his writing abilities. I can relate to that feeling of self-consciousness – not necessarily about my writing ability but more about revealing myself to anyone who should stumble across my blog online.

There have been numerous articles, including my blog posts ironically, about the importance for companies to participate in social media. It’s not all that hard to participate in Twitter – responding to people’s tweets, forwarding or retweeting other tweets, and posting links to interesting stories. In many ways, Twitter is akin to a high-volume broadcast version of truncated emails. And, ever since I got into PR in 1997 or so, I’ve lived and breathed email every day.

And, It’s not all that hard to participate in Facebook either. Posting photos, commenting on other people’s photos, posting links to interesting news articles, commenting on other people’s posts, and, of course, deleting over and over and over again people’s weird icons, sheep, mafia wars updates that come my way[this is not a sentence – I would reword this to make it into a sentence].

However, blogging, for me has been different. Over the years, I’ve often avoided writing a regular blog. Sure, I have had plenty of thoughts and opinions about public relations, technology, the impact of digital media on book publishing, etc., but for some reason a crippling modesty – or even shyness -– has kept me from blogging about my ideas. I’m certainly confident about my professional abilities – working with companies to identify the stories that they want to tell about their business and products, then distilling that information into timely, news worthy announcements designed to garner news coverage. And, I’ve always felt very comfortable stating my opinions to clients, giving them unvarnished feedback about their PR ideas and campaigns.

Yet, despite that confidence in my professional abilities, blogging felt foreign to me. I would try, and it would never feel “right” to me. The self-revealation aspect, posted online so that any one in the world could read what I’d written, constantly inhibited me.

Possibly it’s generational. I’ll be the first to admit that I consider myself on the cutting edge of technology and gadgets. I waited in line for an Xbox 360, a Wii, an iPhone, and other brand-new gadgets. Yet, the first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack color computer – hooked up to an old television for a monitor.

While I’ve always embraced technology, the self-revalatory nature of blogging – while natural for digital natives – has felt awkward and presumptive to me.

Finally though, I realized I needed to join the online conversation more overtly by blogging on a regular basis. I can’t remember a specific watershed moment for my decision. It has been more of a gradual change and a constant process of reminding myself that I do have ideas to contribute (not to sound too much like Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character on Saturday Night Live).

With all this personal background and info, I think it’s something to definitely think about as social media grows – some people for whatever reason are self-conscious about their social media participation.

Christopher S. Penn, one of the co-founders of Podcamp Boston, just blogged about a somewhat similar issue – breaking the shackles of your potential. It’s a great blog post that I recommend you take a look at.

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The tactics deployed recently have nothing to do with debating and discussing healthcare. They’ve been purposely orchestrated to a) drown out the discussion that is trying to happen, and b) from a PR perspective provide a great video clip for the local TV news of people angry about potential healthcare changes and awkward shots of U.S. politicians trying to reason with “angry” constituents.

I immediately started thinking, “What PR counsel would I give in dealing with these mobs and disruption tactics?”

From a marketing perspective, what would you do if your company introduced a product that stirred anger/antipathy from consumers? What would you do if you tried to hold public meetings to discuss a topic of concern to your customers, and your competitor orchestrated people to scream at your CEO and shout down whatever he/she tried to say, regardless of what he was saying.

1. Don’t follow Nardelli’s meeting style. Unfortunately for Bob Nardelli, a once-successful General Electric executive, he will forever be remembered for his biggest business blunder ever – running a dictatorial Home Depot shareholders meeting amidst a bitter year of criticism over the size of his pay packages during a time when he was firing as many experienced, hourly Home Depot workers as he possibly could while keeping the doors of the stores open for business.

Nardelli’s shareholder meeting was memorable to say the least. The board of directors didn’t show up. Nardelli sat alone on stage. Whenever an unhappy shareholder began talking, a very large digital clock began counting down. When the allotted time finished, Nardelli insisted the person stop talking or be immediately removed from the building.

If you won’t all the details, Joe Nocera wrote a memorable New York Times story detailing Nardelli’s fiasco.

2. Don’t give them a platform. If your opponents have shown that they’re not interested in a genuine debate, and they simply want to draw you into awkward situations where you try to reason with several people frothing at the mouth – awkward situations that will be filmed and uploaded to YouTube within minutes – don’t give them the opportunity. In that scenario, they’ve succeeded on one front. They’ve denied you the ability to hold a public meeting.

To use a warfare quote, to succeed in warfare you should fight on the battlefield of your choosing – not the one of your enemy’s choosing. Deny them the confrontation.

3. Do use the platforms that allow you to broadcast – and not receive. If the opposition’s sole aim is to disrupt your message and discussion, use media that goes over, around, and under them. Using this healthcare debate example, the Obama administration should go into campaign mode. If the other side is solely focused on disruption, ignore them and go around them. (I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know all the legal ramifications of political advertising and what’s allowed for these types of policy debates).

Instead of the infamous Harry and Louise commercials that tanked the Clintons’ healthcare overhaul, healthcare proponents should be flooding the TV, radio, and the Internet w/ ads that articulate their positions. Millions of dollars spent to explain your position will go a lot farther and can’t be disrupted by a vocal minority screaming.

4. Make your points, but appeal to emotions. One DNC ad has tried to engage the people disrupting town meetings – and make an issue of their tactics. Not a good move. Acknowledging the yellers in the least, lends them credibility. Ignore them.

Instead, run multiple ads featuring real people from all walks of life who are struggling with healthcare issues – small business people who are going to be forced to fire workers or stop providing health insurance due to the skyrocketing costs, people who have been denied healthcare because of preexisting conditions, and people who are hard workers, love their families, and can’t afford out-of-pocket health insurance for their families. Humanize the issue. Don’t yell, don’t scream, just show the impact of spiraling healthcare costs on a wide spectrum of Americans.

Lots of people talk about using social media to “join the conversation.” What if that conversation is one-sided and the other side only wants to scream, yell, and disrupt? How do you join that conversation?

What would you do if your company was faced with an angry, mob that wasn’t interested in a genuine debate?

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