Responding to Crisis via Social Media

We can learn a lot from the Cork'd case.

The wine social networking site, Corkd.com was hacked yesterday, January 7, 2009. Someone was able to redirect viewers from Cork’d to a well known adult “dating” site. This was a pretty major breach and potentially devastating to the site.

Once people started noticing what was happening, an article appeared on TechCrunch reporting the issue. It so happens that Cork’d is owned by social media guru Mr. Gary Vaynerchuk, who purchased the site a while back.

In typical Gary fashion, he turned a negative into a positive and responded immediately to the crisis. Less than one hour after the article was posted, Gary recorded a video response, via Seesmic (a great video commenting site), admitting there was a problem and that they were working to resolve the issue. He also posted comments on Twitter and today, recorded a video for GaryVaynerchuk.com explaining what happened and using it as a case study on how to use social media for damage control.

The key here is that Gary didn’t just publish some written statement or avoid the issue. He confronted it head on, reached out to the community, put his face out there (egg and all), and diffused the situation. In fact, the whole affair turned out to be very positive for Gary and Cork’d, as it was pretty good publicity costing them nothing.

So, what can we learn from this affair? Sooner or later, we all face situations that can be potentially damaging to our companies or clients. Using social media tools can help you respond quickly in a crisis. Adopting a philosophy of transparency and being genuine will pay off in the long run, increasing brand recognition and equity.