Zynga Tries to Use the Back-door

What many companies fail to understand nowadays is that ANYTHING can affect their reputation, even how they handle redundancies. And this is even truer after the digital revolution, in a world where the word-of-mouth can reach a much wider public in a very short time, thanks to social networks such as Twitter. You know what I'm talking about, right? The Zynga case, of course.

(taken from here)

WHAT HAPPENED

Right on the day of the launch of the iPad Mini (during the launch itself!) Zynga communicated to more than a hundred of its employees that they had two hours to leave the premises, as they were being made redundant. Such a coincidence huh?

And of course someone started tweeting...

The result? Share prices dropped and no one really liked Zynga's behaviour. 

MY OPINION

So you see? Reputation is something so wide that can be influenced by so many factors... a company should really give a tiny little thought about it before doing any action that affects any of its stakeholders. This brings me back to some of the lectures I followed last year, where I was told that PR should influence a company's management, in order to guarantee the sake of its reputation. This has never been so true today. I'm not saying that PRPs should be called for every decision being made, every single detail being fixed; however, asking the opinion of a PRP (in-house) before making such a major move, would have benefitted the company. 

And if it was the PR department that made that decision, in order to try to hide the redundancy news, I think the whole department doesn't really know anything about what's going on nowadays. I mean... Making 100 people redundant during the Apple's launch and getting away with it is not even slightly realistic.

In conclusion, I believe organisations should behave at their best (i.e. as if they were in the spotlight) in all circumstances, most of all when any of their stakeholders are involved, AND that PR considerations should be taken into account before taking any major decisions. Also, something to keep in mind is that employees, future employees, and ex employees are powerful stakeholders of a company that have opinions, friends, and social media profiles - it's not all about the media and journalists.

I'd really love to hear your thoughts about this case and any reflections you have to offer about it.