How to Fight a Crisis with PR

Just listened to a podcast with Nikita Bier by Lenny Rachitsky that explained the power of communications very nicely.

Nikita is famous on Twitter for selling the same company twice (not really). He sold tbh to Facebook, left, built Gas to earn money, and ended up selling it to Discord. He is a master of growth hacking and building viral products.

With Gas, he and his team faced a grave danger. Somebody put out a hoax that the app was facilitating human trafficking. How an anonymous app where users can’t send arbitrary messages could have done, it is irrelevant because the hoax spread faster than the app. They rebranded the app and started with the other coast, and the same hoax resurfaced.

Then Nikita decided to fight it on all fronts. PR became one of them. He went to reporters because he had a bait and a message. The bait was simple: his app led the Social category in the US AppStore. But he used their interest to spread his own message and agreed to talk to the Washington Post only if they used the right headline, which ended up “How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax”.

Nikita spread and amplified the message he needed by planting it into trusted media publications with good SEO. And that’s exactly how you fight a crisis like this. In his case, the media weren’t the original culprit; the hoax spread on social media, messaging apps, and even the app’s AppStore reviews.

Their own website or any blog wouldn’t have good enough SEO to put this at the top of Google Search results. Even more important is that the story in the Washington Post resulted in multiple secondary pieces that spread the story further.

Ultimately, people still trust top-tier media publications with a good brand. You can use this to your advantage, but you have to catch their attention first. Find a cause, use it to broadcast your message.