Today's blog post is a combination of two stories we found on the internet. It’s a veritable nexus of ideas, an alloy of themes, an amalgam of notions if you will, all centred around the central tenet of being nice.
We’ll start with the first story - there’s quite a lot of reading required for this but in essence, the American fast food chain Chick-Fil-A, lied about their reasons (which were, in our opinion, less than noble) for removing a certain line of children’s toys from their meals.
They then proceeded to re-write the book on how to completely miss-manage a PR situation in the social media landscape. More than that, they found all the extant copies of the previous book on the same topic, had them pulped and then burned the pulp.
The key thing to take from this story is that people aren’t stupid. Especially people that have an internet connection (and by extension access to almost the whole of human recorded history up until right now. No, wait, right now. Right NOW. You get the point). The take home moral of the story is that trying to ingratiate your company with clients through dishonest means is never a good idea. People see right through bootlicking and try to distance themselves from such individuals or companies.
Ulterior motives also play a part in the next story (gosh that segue was smooth, wasn’t it?). The nucleus of this post is that it’s okay to have an ulterior motive for being nice, but don’t rely on the party you’re trying to charm reciprocating.
Both of these stories approach PR from opposite directions but each gives the same basic advice: just don’t lie to your customers. Whether you’re worried about a potential PR disaster or trying to garner favour, make sure your motives are clear.
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