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Can This Reputation Be Saved?

The San Francisco Zoo

The Short Answer: Probably not for a long time.

Lesson Number 1: Never have a major disaster during a slow news week.

The news that San Francisco Zoo's Siberian tiger Tatiana escaped, killed someone and then was herself shot might never have made national headlines had it not occurred on the one day a year when PR people put their families before their clients.

(Don't get me wrong. I have a huge amount of respect for PR people. They are probably the most hardworking, dedicated individuals this side of Obama or Ron Paul campaign workers. They work all the time. I know, because I get emails from them at midnight, and when I dare to respond at that hour, I am frequently rewarded with a phone call.)

They, and the companies they represent, do tend to take the holidays off, so that is the one time of year when the editors and reporters that are working aren't being bombarded with press releases. So that's how it was that the airwaves were taken over by a tiger on Christmas. And it wasn't just our airwaves. It made Xinhua in China and the Hindustan Times of India.

What followed was a classic case of poor crisis management. The Zoo's executive director, Manuel Mollinedo, misstated the height of the wall and then afterward "wasn't available for interviews." With the Zoo now facing numerous lawsuits and investigations, it didn't take long for the media to pick up on the fact that Mollinedo was an unpopular leader, and then for them to start listing details of every other misstep and crisis the zoo has suffered since his tenure began in 2004.

The good news for the zoo is that the ire and investigation seem to be focused on Mollinedo rather than on the zoo itself, which has been frequently described as "much beloved." If they get rid of the focus of the public fury, there's a good chance that the crisis will die down for a little while. However, when each one of the threatened lawsuits comes to court, the media will pick up the topic and the reputation of the institution will once again be dragged through the mud.

What zoo officials don't seem to realize is that if families don't feel safe going to their zoo, they have lots and lots of other options, including the Oakland Zoo just across the Bay. That's the rub in these times -- one always has options, lots of them. And chances are the residents of the Bay Area are discovering them.

This is a classic example of how what may initially be seen as a "PR nightmare" quickly passes out of PR and into the realms of finance and customer satisfaction.

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