So, as part of a plan to lighten things up around here, I asked for submissions for fictional PR problems (inspired by my Star Trek social media and PR post) and got some really good replies (at least if no-one gives me a new one next week, there’s plenty here to play with). Thanks everyone for the entries, the winner for this week was from the wonderful Barry Dewar:

A giant Japanese monster descends on the UK. The police are quickly overwhelmed while people and property is being destroyed. The press discover that it’s all being stage-managed by an evil criminal mastermind with a self-image problem. The world teeters on the edge of distaster….Save us Social Media!

OK, so we’ve got an emergency first of all, a big monster, an evil mastermind, end of the world. Yeah, PR can sort that out.

Here’s how this would play out in PR and social media….

Digital media would break this story probably as the monster climbs up over the white cliffs of Dover and starts to rampage. At first people would be dismissing it as some sort of web hoax or promotion for a film or comic (I can think of at least one Scottish writer who’s made more outlandish hype claims than ‘a monster is attacking!’ to sell his comics) but as it got nearer civilisation (London) word would quickly spread via Twitter and text that this monster was indeed real. Two people would probably create the same hashtag around now and post-event spend years fighting over who created it.

For the emergency services, this would be a nightmare. They would more than likely rely on traditional channels as COBRA was meeting but a few savvy types would put advice out on 2.0 networks (either hide in your basement or RUN! Either way, stay off the roads, don’t forget to pay the road fee if you do go on them) until the emergency services took over the network (or it crashed), which is actually the worst thing they could do.

At this point, a lot of the effort would probably come from civilians because the emergency services don’t have the resource or foreplanning to use 2.0 for something like this while the under-staffed press would be too busy running about trying to cover the story.

Civilians would be filling in the gaps though – there would probably be a GoogleMap showing all the devastation so far, tying in pics, tweets and blogs while minor online celebrities would be created from people trying to liveblog from near the monster – either trapped in their basement or watching from a high vantage point.

While the network for London and the surrounding south-east would be swamped as people panicked, the rest of the globe would be enjoying quite a real-time spectacle. And it’s at this point that the problems would begin…

Enter the mastermind…

While looking at some of the images, a keen Japanese guy spots what looks like a QR code on the big toe of the monster. Now he’s seen that style of code somewhere before. A few bits of Googling and he’s matched the image to something at MegaCorp Inc. So he’s put that out there – and online types loving a conspiracy theory have gone wild with it because up until now all they’ve worked out is that the monster appears to have crossed the world from the Far East and Greenpeace were blaming the French for nuclear bomb testing.

Of course MegaCorp Inc outsource a lot of their PR, including digital, so it’s going to take them hours – if not Monday (the monster attack is taking place on a Friday) – before this starts feeding back to them. However there’s one department monitoring all of this in real-time and that’s the very secretive black ops department which answers directly to the CEO, who has a sideline in wanting to take over the world.

Now they’ve gone to the CEO and said “this one of ours?” and he’s replied “Mwah mwah mwah” and cackled as he cuddled his favourite cat. Yes, yet again, the boss has gone and done something without informing other parts of the company – black ops to even the black ops team. So there’s not much they can do but react as it plays out. If the monster does well, the goal of world domination has been achieved early and it’s bonuses all round. Head of PR gets New Zealand.

But just in case it goes Monster poo shaped, they pull out the Crisis PR plan that they have for these events. And just as well because that’s when they spot the posting by the Japanese lad…

Back in London…

Meanwhile London’s going downhill quick, but all the politicians and royalty have gotten out so nuclear is now being considered an option, especially as everyone forgot to tell Boris Johnson to leave. But The Independent and The Guardian have started posting stories about what’s being called ‘The MegaCorp Tattoo’ that was spotted by Japanese lad (The Times had it first but no one saw it behind the paywall).

Meanwhile the cops and other emergency services are asking people to stay offline and to stop posting updates as it’s just spreading rumour and conjecture and not actually helping. The services are in full-on control mode and not accepting that you can’t control the situation and the message but can coerce them via social. Once the Army gets involved, it gets worse and there’s a lack of info coming from official sources.

MegaCorp’s Black PR department sigh and spin into action with a quick statement – mentioned and linked to on their main company page – about claims of a branded monster ripping up London and that they are investigating. Realising that they can still turn this into a PR win, they go public asking for people to send in images of the monster, particularly the brand as well as any video and sound that they get along with any other pertinent data. By going crowdsourcing, people are already thinking of this company as on their side as opposed to the cops who are trying to shut them all down. They also get first look at all the footage that will be analysed for years afterwards, giving them more time to prepare any damage control statements.

MegaCorp also activates a Google AdWords policy that’s been sitting, waiting for this. All mentions of words like Monster, London are snapped up. Millions spent within minutes as anyone clicking on the links is taken to a page which is providing (filtered) real-time information provided by the Black PR team.

As this happens, the CEO gets whisked away somewhere very remote – the undersea base or volcano interior lair, if not the actual moonbase that’s tucked away for a rainy day – as he realises that the game is afoot and just launching one monster onto England wasn’t enough. He should have planned a lot better. And if he gets the blame for this one, he can’t come back to rule the world another day.

The Black PR team find a story that works: this monster was released by a worker at the complex where the creature was created. Despite the creature having no brain (a lie, but it stops PETA and so on going on about animal suffering. No brain = no suffering will be the argument) he fell for it (that sort of crazy quirkiness gives the foreign-bashing press across the globe a chance to indulge in ‘those crazy Japanese’ type articles deflecting from the real issue) and released it into the wild to be free. Having since seen the damage it has caused, he’s killed himself (well, he hasn’t but it sure looked that way and besides, doesn’t every PR team have a good assassin on the books?).

(If the PR team is really, really creative and shifty, they’ll also have had this company which made the monsters be an entity of its own so that the financial fallout to MegaCorp is minimal)

With the blame shifted away from the CEO onto a (dead) lowly person, it’s now about stopping the monster and getting the good press from that. Again, crowdsource it.

Tell the people of London that if 10,000 people gather in one place and get the monster to chase them, three super hi-tec monster hunters (again ‘those crazy Japanese’) will bring the monster down at a certain point.

This is all done via the web, so cops are going mental as they can’t control this. People turn up, monster sees food and chases. Monster Hunters (three guys with RPGs really) blow head off monster (destroys evidence of the brain that PR firm had already said didn’t exist).

People of London all get to feel like heroes for playing their part in saving their city, feel empowered, encourages them to help with the city rebuilding effort. (Digital types also love a call to arms.)

Black PR team then move this on rapidly with documents – from ‘sources’ and with video and audio and highly technical details – being leaked to wikileaks, implying that lots of companies and countries actually have ‘monsters’ as such under development. If need be, fake up some monster skeletons at the bottom of the sea with competitor branding too. This takes the argument away from what happened in London to ‘they’re everywhere, what can we do’?

The official MegaCorp PR team should also release all and any info on the monster so that – just in case the CEO throws another wobbler – other people know how to defeat the thing (because after London, Monster Hunter rates will go through the roof). Also, the more transparent the company appears to be, the more likely people will accept that this was a ‘mistake’.

PR team should also announce screening for all MegaCorp staff to prevent this sort of ‘release’ happening again.

Then it’s a case of getting ready for the anniversary stuff and the documentaries…well, that’s while every other PR company and their clients anywhere near London make hay out of this scenario. This sort of thing would be a bonanza for so many industries.

Lessons for all:

Police and emergency services: People will use public information networks in times of crisis regardless of what you tell them to do. You can realise information quicker and be useful – create hashtags for example – or you can be in the road.

CEO: Plan properly. If going for world domination, take over the world. You can’t just do destruction on a city by city basis any more. You could also crowdsource all the end of world types, the Lovecraftian followers and so on, but that’s a post for another day.

Black PR team: These guys are the only ones that come out of this with credit as they did the first rule of PR: plan, plan, plan for any and every eventuality. They also worked out how to turn your meglomaniac boss into a sympathetic character:

1. Get him away from the cameras
2. Totally downplay his involvement, blame an underling. Even better if they’ve since committed suicide (or made to look like it) since their terrible action
3. Reveal what the monster actually was. An attempt at mass-producing the healthiest meat in the world, meat that also had properties for fighting Alzheimers because the CEO’s dad had a terrible case of it (humanise the boss. He may have been misguided in finding this project, but the motives were good). Also, it urinated clean drinking water. One of these monsters (with kids) would be a full food/drink solution for villages in the third world.
4. Pay plenty to the clean-up operation. Anyone who died? Their kids go to university free of charge and the family mortgage is paid off (also, get the accountants to find a way of using all this as a loss to minimise tax)
5. Move the goalposts on. Either have the global online community looking for more of these monsters – hint that there’s lots of them and other companies are creating them too – or close down all your operations in this area (and then just start them up somewhere else really remote).
6. Get the balance sheet in the black as soon as possible. Rest of the world might hate you but if investors still love you, it’s half the battle. If you can stay in business you can turn anything else round. Once you’re out of business it’s game over.
7. After six months get the CEO out to do a mea culpa about what happened and why the company did what it did.

What do the rest of you think? What would you PR or use social media for in the event of a monster hitting your city?