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PR Fuel: LinkedIn to YuenglingAn interesting public relations debacle was brewing at beer-maker Yuengling this week, and the company scored a C+ for its efforts to defuse the situation.The problems started last week when a man named Brad Walsh was assaulted in Manhattan by another man driving a Yuengling delivery truck. The truck driver spewed homophobic epithets at Walsh and then punched him in the face. This happened in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Walsh called the police and filed a report, complete with the truck's license plate number. Walsh then did what any other person would do: He called Yuengling. Walsh spoke to Yuengling's Vice President of Human Resources, who immediately apologized for the incident and expressed her dismay and best wishes to Walsh. She, however, passed the buck to the distribution company whose employee and truck were involved. Walsh understood that the man who assaulted him wasn't a Yuengling employee, but as he said, "The simplicity of the situation is that dozens of people saw an angry man hop out of a truck with a giant 'Yuengling' written on the side, punch a pedestrian, and then get back in the truck and drive away. I'm sure I'm not the only person who assumed he was a direct employee of Yuengling." After pressing the matter, Walsh was informed by Yuengling that the company couldn't provide him with any additional information. Enter the blogosphere, where people like me posted on Walsh's blog, offering up contact information for the distributor. (Believe it or not, I know a lot about beer distribution in the New York City area.) Whether it was Walsh's own doing or Yuengling pressuring its partner, he finally heard back from the distributor, which said it had fired the driver. Walsh thanked the distributor for its actions and Yuengling for its, albeit difficult to get, help. It would be easy to say that Yuengling really had nothing to do with this since the truck was not its own. But, as Walsh pointed out, you better believe that people who witnessed the incident didn't automatically think, "Well, that's an independent distributor's truck." In addition, Walsh put pressure on the company by blogging about the incident, which became much-talked-about on New York City blogs and within the gay, lesbian and transsexual communities. With the pressure building, Yuengling should have known that it had to take quicker action. What Yuengling should have done was to be more proactive once Walsh contacted the company. Yuengling should have immediately investigated the incident with its distributor and asked for a prompt resolution while keeping Walsh informed of the situation. In the process, the company should have asked Walsh not to comment publicly on the situation so that nothing would interfere with the process of determining what happened. Based on Walsh's attitude, it's likely he would not have blogged about the subject until the issue was resolved. One of the ways this situation could have been handled better was if the PR people for Yuengling had gotten involved earlier. I assume they weren't because they would have told the HR person not to email Walsh (i.e., no paper trail) and to handle the problem more swiftly. They also would have told the HR person to give up the distributor's information immediately. (Yuengling has one distributor for the entire NYC area, so the company knew whose truck was involved.) This is another example of why PR people need to work in conjunction with HR, customer service, sales, marketing, tech support and virtually anybody within a company who has contact with the public. ___ I've written in the past about how LinkedIn can be a valuable networking, sales and PR tool. Recently, I've been taking advantage more of the Answers section of the website, chiming in and answering queries from other people. Some of the questions are funny or time-wasters (such as, "What's your favorite movie quote?"). The majority, however, are serious in nature, and my answer to one question last week led to a reporter contacting me - and our company actually closing a sale. That made answering the question the most efficient five minutes I've worked in a long time.
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