Crisis PR for Amazon: The Cloud Is Falling! The Cloud Is Falling!

Posted by on Apr 22, 2011 in Social Approach, White Hat PR | 8 comments

Boy does Amazon have some trouble on its hands today. With EC2 clawing its way back into working order, and Hootsuite, Foursquare, and Reddit addicts still shaking uncontrollably from a day’s down time, the giant of affordable, flexible cloud computing is going to have to figure out how to restore confidence in a service that already struck many end users as, well, nebulous.

While Amazon’s EC2 customers — and probably Amazon’s engineers as well — would love to believe that redundancies would never allow a massive failure to happen, yesterday reminded us that sometimes the unthinkable happens, even to methodical planners. What separates success from failure at that point is how intelligently and quickly the problem is managed — and not just from a tech perspective. From a reputational standpoint, too.

The folks at Amazon are no doubt working like dogs right now to restore, resolve, and prevent a recurrence of the EBS re-mirroring overload that took their storage to capacity and beyond. But as knotty as the technical aspects of the fix may be, the cloud giant should also be taking this time to publicly reassure the world that cloud technology and Amazon itself are worthy of another go. This is no time for a company to, as the New York Times reported, “not respond to requests for comment.”

Crisis PR isn’t rocket (or computer) science — but you do have to take it seriously, and long before anything hits the fan. A few important concepts for crisis management:

  • Planning – Analysis of potential “points of attack” on corporate reputation – the vulnerable salients where a company faces potential exposure and damage. Develop advance messaging for negative events, and assignments of “war room” responsibilities for when and if crisis strikes.
  • Practice – Training and role-playing for the internal crisis PR team to ensure readiness. No one ever prepared for “the worst” just by reading a plan.
  • Proactivity – Tools and skills for going on the offensive when a crisis strikes – and to avoid worsening the crisis through stonewalling.

Following that framework, what should we have seen from Amazon? Instant public comment and accessibility with a calm, apologetic, and down-to-business tone accepting responsibility and providing good reason to believe that all will be well. Quotes to every major interested media outlet, answering questions and providing up-to-the-minute information. What did we see instead? Silence from Amazon in media coverage; status info on the company’s own site; and — I kid you not — an online form for media/industry analyst queries. Not good.

Amazon will undoubtedly fix the problem in its data center, but it should spend as much time fixing its crisis response strategy for the next time the unthinkable happens. Confidence is a hard-won asset; you don’t just let it go up in a cloud of smoke.

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  • http://www.elixirinteractivepr.com fionnd

    Unbelivable. A company in the online space who adopts a policy like this is a major crisis. It doesnt matter how many times it happens, BP, Dell, British Airways now Amazon these big companies still go down the traditional PR route. Their PR team should be fired. They are so vunerable because of the space they are in. The old rules are over they have been over for years and Amazon more than anybody should know that. They will get killed online and they are getting killed right now for handling it this way. The web has forced transparency and companies in crisis who do not give it will suffer the consequences.

  • kateschackai

    Thanks for commenting! I hear you — and at the same time, I think this would be irresponsible PR by the standards of, oh, 50 years ago. The New York Times updated their post on the topic today and it *still* says that no one at Amazon had responded to their request for comment. Cloud computing still sounds very novel and risky to a lot of people, and Amazon should be sticking its collective neck out to defend the technology, even if that requires a big mea culpa.

  • Javier Jones

    Absolutely agree with your article. Beyond the tech aspect, PR is also part of the equation and has to be aligned with the company guidelines. It is so easy to destroy a solid reputation and Amazon this time is choosing this path. We only hope they can learn from this leason, but seriously, Amazon has to do some drastic changes to be able to communicate properly to the real world. Good post.

  • kateschackai

    Appreciate it, Javier! It’s fascinating to me that so many of these really innovative tech companies — sometimes even those who have driven the online communications revolution — still frankly suck at communicating themselves. Amazon will fix the tech side of this, and I think they’re an amazing company, but they need to grasp that a tech fix won’t necessarily translate into public perception. Thanks again for reading and commenting!

  • Ketan

    I recommended your post to some of my peers. It was an opportunity for Amazon to actually win their clients and reputation by taking them into confidence and sharing its platform problems openly.
    In tech world, these things happen with best of companies and with best of platforms. Nothing to be ashamed of! By getting away from the problem and hiding is not the solution.
    Really appreciate your article. good luck.

  • kateschackai

    Ketan,

    I appreciate that, and couldn’t agree more on the missed opportunity and the simple reality that everything breaks at some point. There really is so much value in how you handle it.

    There was another article last week that pointed out that Amazon’s missteps here have given competitors a talking point for years to come. I think that’s true, but I also believe that Amazon actually allowed the whole cloud computing industry to take a hit that everyone will now have to recover from. Just too bad.

    Thanks again for reading and commenting!

    Best,
    Kate

  • http://www.3hatscommunications.com/blog/ Davina K. Brewer

    With big companies like this and so much productivity and money lost, I have to suspect part of the ‘no comment’ problem is legal. The lawyers don’t want anything said publicly that could substantiate a liability claim, so any apology or mea culpa is nixed. IDK.

    Confidence is hard won; I don’t expect perfection so when my normally reliable service crashes, restore my confidence by telling me “Yes we know, yes we are working hard to correct, repair and prevent future fails..” and keeping me in the loop. Mistakes happen, it’s what happens next that can make a bigger difference. FWIW.

  • kateschackai

    Davina,

    You may very well be right about legal, but I’d call that part of the problem. Especially if Amazon was willing and able to update their corporate blog, you’d think they could at least release some kind of statement to the New York Times. The “we don’t need no stinkin’ media” approach leaves a bad taste in the mouths of folks who *might* have become customers.

    Thanks for the comment!

    Kate