Spin Control Part II

In my last post, we considered the curious case of BP CEO Tony Hayward, and some of his incautious remarks to the press during the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s tempting to dismiss such things as being the understandable result of a man under stress, trying to lead a company in crisis while being pestered by news media who have no more idea of what’s going on than he does. Unfortunately, the story isn’t a much of an isolated case as we might hope, as demonstrated by the reaction of AT&T to a customer emailing their CEO the other day…

I picked up the story off of the Engadget technology website, but you can find it in a few other places online if you want to. The basic idea is that an AT&T customer had some technical and business operations questions about the company, so he sent them to the CEO’s email address. After sending his second email, he got a polite but firm call from the company, advising him that if he didn’t stop emailing the CEO, AT&T was going to initiate legal action against him…

To me, the wildest part of the entire story, and the question that really needs to be answered here, is why anyone at the company cares in the first place. Blocking all messages received from this inquisitive fellow’s email, or just setting up a filter to deleted unauthorized emails from the CEO’s account, is so simple that even a graduate student like me can do it; alternately, the CEO could just delete the messages, unopened, each morning when he gets in. But I think we are also justified in asking why the CEO of a company that size is reading, let alone responding to, random emails from the public in the first place. I routinely delete messages from unknown senders; granted that most of them are only trying to interest me in lucrative job opportunities where I send them $800 and they run away and never speak to me again, but if I can handle the pressure, it’s hard to imagine while a guy with a seven-figure salary can’t…

Now, it is entirely possible that AT&T just does not care about this situation. With BP taking up most of the business news, and most of the attention on portable wireless devices focused on the iPad and iPhone (and their various knockoffs) these days, the company may figure that any adverse PR generated by this action isn’t going to draw the attention of anyone more important than a few grumpy bloggers. They may even be justifying these actions, saying that the CEO’s time is too important to spend dealing with random emails, or that these unwelcome public intrusions are harshing his mellow, or whatever. I’m going to respond by pointing out that no one in that industry has an especially good reputation, and while AT&T isn’t the worst, they don’t need any more people deciding to bail on them and go to another carrier. And if they lose their exclusive contract with Apple to support the iPhone, they’re really going to regret these image issues…

In many ways, this sort of random public relations gaff is really a violation of the First Law of Business. AT&T may not realize that it is, in effect, telling a paying customer to go away and not bother them, but that doesn’t make this any less asinine a thing to tell someone who wants to give you more money every month. It anything, I’d have to say it makes it worse. And while I’m not currently an AT&T stockholder, if I was, I’d be asking some very serious questions about what senior management thinks it’s doing with my money…