FROM THE EDITOR

AS THIS ISSUE goes to press, I’ve been thinking a lot about publicity—both the good and bad kind. There are a number of reasons for that, including the recent slew of politicians and other public figures who’ve had to do the misconduct walk of shame, but it’s also been on my mind because I just finished putting together the notes for a presentation on getting free press for the upcoming SCAA show. The class mostly covers how to get good publicity—how to do the right things and make the correct connections so that newspapers and magazines will write about your company.
     But I also talk about how to deal with bad publicity. At this point in the presentation, a lot of people start shifting in their seats and looking bored. They probably think they’d be so happy to get press—any press—for their company that they’d take the bad with the good. Or they think that bad press won’t or can’t happen to them. However, other people lean forward or start taking notes. You can tell that they’ve had the experience of trying to deal with not just bad publicity, but with the ripple effect that comes after, both in the coffee community and out of it. Blog posts, gossip, follow-up articles, customer inquires—these are just a few of the things that a company needs to deal with after.
     It would be great to think that if we just do our job, do it well and with integrity and to the best of our ability, we could avoid anything negative about us in print. But it’s one of the universal truths: bad press happens. That means the more innocuous instances, like “Oops, our roaster caught on fire and burned down the whole building,” or “Oh, no, someone just broke into our delivery truck!” to those incredibly difficult ones, such as when an employee or a company owner breaks the law or when someone in the company misrepresents a product or situation on purpose.
     It’s not an easy situation for anyone. Trust me, most writers and editors don’t enjoy writing bad news articles even if that is often what sells their publication. The easy solution is to say the obvious: Run your business the best you can. Don’t lie, cheat or steal. Try to do things properly. Keep the flames under control, in all senses of that word. But if it’s too late for that, and the press is already out there, there are ways to make it easier on everyone involved:

• Don’t keep doing what it was that got you in hot water in the first place. Stop letting the chaff sit around, don’t park in the bad part of town and ask your employees (or your boss for that matter) to do the same.

• When you’re talking with the reporter who’s writing your story, don’t be a jerk. Help them tell the story fully by giving them the information they need, saying intelligent things when they ask questions and just generally being helpful. They’re going to get the information one way or another—why not have it come from you?

• Come clean once the news is out there (if you didn’t beforehand). Apologize and make amends (or, in the terms of things like fire, make jokes) with your customers, the public, the coffee community and the press. Use it as a teaching tool, or as opportunity to give them just one more reason to support you.

• If you’re going to read the bulletin boards, chats, blogs and the like about what happened, don’t make a bad situation worse by responding to every bad note and comment with an inflammatory remark. If you’re going to respond, do so with thought, care and some semblance of proper spelling.

Bad press is never pretty, but it’s likely to be short-lived, especially if you handle it properly. And then we can all go back to reading about the things that help us make our businesses better. Or at least more enjoyable.

      Keep the flame burning,

      Shanna