Planning Your Next PR Disaster: What You Can Learn from Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi
By: Bill Lessard
Tags: Technology, Public Relations, Uber, Social Media

Image courtesy NYPL

This week, everyone is talking about Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s interview with Axios on HBO, where he calls the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi a “mistake” by the Saudi government and compares the incident to getting hit by a self-driving car. That the comment was followed by a next-day walk-back has done little to quell the media backlash nor stifle the call among Twitter activists that Uber customers mass-delete the app.

Failure of such magnitude isn’t an accident. It takes practice — over the course of days, months, often years. Uber was founded in 2009. It has a decade-long track record of saying the exact wrong thing. Each new failing stacks on top of the previous, creating a true monument to PR ineptitude.

Among Uber’s most successful failures: Former CEO Travis Kalanick’s GQ profile, where he describes his increased appeal to women as a “Boob-er” and deflects a question about customer service issues by channeling Charlie Sheen: “If you can get a Prius for cheaper than a taxi, you just changed 100,000 people’s lives in a city. If you can get it reliably? Holy shit…That’s hashtag winning.”

Being sexist, quoting a sexist celebrity with the social profile of expired milk — are only part of the formula.

Also key is timing. If you want a PR disaster that’s in the same league as Uber’s, you must say the exact wrong thing, at the exact wrong moment. For instance, when you are in the middle of a labor dispute with your drivers, that’s the perfect instant for one of your co-founders to get caught buying a $72.5 million mansion in Beverly Hills.

The principle at work here is optics. It’s about not caring how something you do looks. In Goodfellas, when the members of Jimmy’s gang show up at the Christmas party with the fur coats and brand-new Cadillacs they bought with that Lufthansa heist money, they are demonstrating that, like an unruly gang of techbros, a true PR disaster must court the direst consequences.

For Uber, it’s not the cops who are the problem. It’s the company’s lagging profitability, its unsuccessful attempts to diversify beyond its core ride-hailing business and its indifference to public sentiment. According to a recent Pew Research survey, people rate the technology industry somewhere between airlines and getting barfed on on the NYC subway. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, here’s a quick recap: Steve Jobs is dead, dead, dead. Nobody is hanging on Tim Cook’s launch keynotes, and there are no lines winding around the block for the new iPhone.

What should you do? How should your company kick-start its journey toward PR disaster?

We are living on the age of the 3 a.m. tweet, when the long-term benefits of strategic communications are secondary to the immediate dopamine rush of the spectacle. For your company to stay current with this trend, I recommend adapting Uber’s failure skills to your organization and omitting the rare occasions when the beleaguered ride-hailing service did get it right — such as this pre-IPO story PBS NewsHour did, showcasing the smart, data-driven company Uber is underneath its dysfunctional corporate culture.

Playlist:

“Stand by Your Man” — Tammy Wynette

“Ace of Spades” — Motorhead

“Say What You Mean” — The Lunachicks

“Crazy Train” — Ozzy Osbourne

“Jolene” — Dolly Parton

“End of the Line” — The Traveling Wilburys