case study in action > the carat mistake

Say someone in your business accidentally sends a sensitive email to a number of unintended recipients... an email that speaks of pending layoffs... and this email makes it into a major trade website... generating quite a bit of early echo across the web (including mainstream news).

Now what do you do?

This nightmare has become an unfortunate reality at the Carat ad agency. Apparently someone accidentally hit "send all" on an internal sensitive note about planned layoffs, strategies for maintaining core talent, etc.

It's an ugly situation. It's an ugly scene. And it's going to get worse.

Employee moral has to be low. Retaining core talent is going to be more difficult than ever. Clients may get frisky. The ad magazines and bloggers may well begin to get chatty in a bad way. This is bad news for everyone except recruiters. You've got to feel bad for the people over at the Carat offices.

Transparency is powerful.

But what do you do if you are the victim of mistaken transparency, of a leaked internal memo?

What would you do if you were Carat?

Here's what I would do, how about you?

Internal

• Call an immediate meeting of key managers.  Establish talking points.  Explain the mistake.  Give them as much direction as possible.
• Send out a mass email....
  • explaining that while there will be some restructuring, the following are your core clients and capabilities.  Business will go on as usual,
  • apologizing for the previous email and recognizing that it was a mistake,
  • inviting employees to speak with their managers.
• Sponsor a low-key company wide breakfast office-by-office where your CEO explains the situation, starting with your largest office - tomorrow morning.

External

• Carefully measure the project path this projectile will take. 
• If you see this fizzling, do not feed the fire with fresh content and response.  Monitor carefully and set up a contingency plan. (note: I am not claiming that this story has or has not already taken off, waranting Carat PR/ePR involvement.)
• If you're getting phone calls from the NY Times, NBC and The Wall Street Journal, it's time to set up a PR/ePR plan.
• Consider expediting your plans for the future, potentially launching a rebranding campaign starting tonight.
  
• Set up key talking points, issue a press release, set up talking points for corporate pr and guidelines for ePR and blogger engagement.
• Consider using the momentum to create a new corporate practice area - social media transparency consulting.

It is hard to call any answer right or wrong. 

Every answer has it's pros and cons. 

Mistakes happen.

Social media isn't just about the good times, it's about getting business done.

If you were called in to consult, what would YOU do?

photo credit here