The only way to manage online crisis is to be honest!

Here’s a case study (from my perspective knowing through the social media only) of how a social media website manages a potential social media crisis themselves.

I was watching Cranky Geeks a couple of weeks ago when I got to know the presence of this TechCrunch intern named “Daniel Brusilovsky”. And not long after, TechCrunch posted an apology post that the intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.

I would personally think that this is the best way (and it’s definitely the only way!) to manage online crisis as everybody is gonna talk about it sooner or later.  I respect Michael Arrington for how he had managed this at TechCrunch.  It only shows how matured he is when dealing with potential social media crisis.  He simply posted up an apology without demand… And if he doesn’t post that, I probably wouldn’t know at all anyway.

On the other hand, Daniel Brusilovsky posted to express his gratitude and also apologized publicly to everybody on his blog that he has crossed the line.

Now, we can have a good feeling that this is going for the good… And I believe everybody (myself especially) will continue to support TechCrunch for their transparency as they are the leading website for helping us to keep in touch with social media news.

And I think that Daniel Brusilovsky is a person whom we can learn a lot from with his entrepreneurship at such a young age working on a couple of projects.  I have followed Daniel on twitter and I will continue to learn from him.  Interesting to note… If not for this crisis, I wouldn’t know his presence… Isn’t this ironic?  No actually… Because if you manage the crisis well, you might be able to turn the table around…. If not, you will suffer like Tiger Woods from the domino effect of crisis attack…

Photo Credit: Rudi Roels