Rentokil are not doing themselves any favours right now in either PR nor social media. On the PR front, the fact that they blatantly misled the media about infestations on public transport was gloriously picked apart by Ben Goldacre of Bad Science blog fame.
Rentokil essentially lied. You can’t play cute and send out figures saying WE FOUND THIS IN TRAIN COMPARTMENTS only to then attempt to distance yourself by saying, “Actually, umm, that was just theoretical… for something like a train compartment… which no-one ever cleaned or even visited”. I’m not sure whether the cockroaches or Rentokil’s PR machine make me want to scrub myself down more.
Of course, the whole furore was quickly picked up by Twitter users everywhere which brought more pressure on Rentokil. However, as Ben Goldacre’s blog details, they only reacted BECAUSE of this pressure as opposed to doing it because, well, trying to put the record straight is the decent thing to do. Ben had been asking their PR for the actual sources on the dodgy figures for a while but getting nowhere initially.
It’s pretty simple: Social media is about engagement with people. When engaging with people you should not do evil things. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, the community site of your choice… they follow those same guiding principles of other forms of communication over the years. The only new element is the sheer number of people using all this stuff.
Rentokil claim to be just finding their feet in social media, hence cute posts about why they are following people on Twitter. Spam follows are, strangely enough, annoying. I get followed by an increasing number ‘social media experts’ or accounts which just spam quotes (or both in some cases!) let alone pest control ones.
The thing is, that cuteness does not go very far when Rentokil state themselves that they are being advised by ‘social media partner’ Wonderful. Well, clearly something is going wrong there somewhere. The public isn’t falling for the, “Hey, isn’t pest control kinda quirky, and hey, we don’t know much about social media, sorry for any mistakes!” line and it is pretty bad that they are trying it in the first place. Rentokil is actually paying money for this sort of advice.
You can’t lay all of the blame at their social media partner though. It is just an unfortunate bit of timing that Rentokil’s own PR team decided to have a bit of a lapse of ethics and then not having the social media savvy to control the situation properly. That said, if you do something REALLY bad (like, you know, lying about infestations to the media to try and sell a product…) no amount of social media tinkering is going to allow you to save face.
Unless, of course, you back it up by taking strong action. A cute apology does not count as strong action.
