Eclipse Glasses, Anybody? When PR Moves TOO Fast …

How to manage the unexpected nightmares of wildly successful PR

As specialists in high-stakes communications, we’re accustomed to getting crisis PR calls. But this call was highly unusual. His name is Roger Sarkis , and he’s granted permission for me to share his recent off-the-rails adventure with viral PR.

Aspects of his story are entertaining. Even funny. We can all learn from Roger’s adventure. But a part of Sarkis is ruing the day he concocted his idea to do some good with a bit of well-intended PR.

An adjunct faculty member for UVU and Project Management expert by day, Sarkis and his wife Allyssa, always ready for an adventure, devised the idea around the time of the April 8, 2024 eclipse to quickly gather used eclipse glasses after their one-time use and ship them to locations such as Hawaii and Latin America for the next upcoming eclipse.

?It made perfect sense – rather than throw away the tons of paper and plastic after their use during the initial viewing, communities could drop off or send the glasses for re-use rather than throwing them away. As a science educator, Sarkis could save tons of non-recyclable waste and help new communities save the mountains of money they’d otherwise spend on new glasses. The news would also create hundreds or even thousands of backlinks to his education and ecommerce website, which wouldn’t hurt.

So, he put out a simple news alert through social media platforms and pitched the story to a few regional stations. They bit. The story went viral when each station covered it, spurring more attention and scoring stories at even bigger outlets throughout the U.S.

Utah’s KSL and KUTV2 stories quickly spread to USA Today, CNN, Washington Post and many others. The idea was a big hit, and the result was a national phenomenon. Emails arrived by the hundreds, then thousands. The internet backlinks to Sarkis’ business also mounted by the hundreds, as each sharing and re-sharing of the news included the links to Eclipse Glasses USA.

Then the mail started coming. People began sending their used eclipse glasses to the P.O. box Sarkis had established, which was rapidly overwhelmed by boxes and baskets of glasses. The Post Office, overwhelmed with the need to hold and house the materials but not allowed to refuse the materials, began delivering the many boxes per day to his house. Inexplicably, many shipments started arriving via FedEx, which had somehow gotten ahold of Sarkis’ home address. The garage is now full. A rented storage unit is overfilling.

Sarkis immediately posted on his website that he was no longer accepting deliveries, which myriad senders have ignored.

Required by policy to deliver all the way to the endpoint, FedEx began its own daily deliveries to Sarkis’ Utah residence, billing back the additional cost to the original shippers. This is where the real trouble began – while Sarkis had never asked for shipment of glasses via overnight delivery, the senders, irate at now incurring an extra cost, were asking for refunds. Now what? Could the good deed gone haywire also turn into a legal nightmare? At his wit’s end, Sarkis consulted with a Provo, Utah attorney. Thankfully, he was assured he didn’t have a legal problem but rather a PR quandary, and the attorney referred him to SnappConner PR for our guidance in crisis PR.

In our consultation call, Roger wondered:

• What could he do to protect the spirit of what he’d intended without alienating the American Astronomical Society, who’d collaborated on the project, or the educators excited to expand the public interest in astronomy science?
• How could he avoid angering the people who contributed the used glasses to extend the use of the one-time products and eliminate trash?
• Could this somehow become a reputation nightmare? Would the traction and benefit to his website suddenly be revoked?
• What would he do with the excess tonnage to get back his garage and eliminate the storage unit?
• How can he make it all stop?

Yes, Roger’s story is funny (although right now, the humor is somewhat lost). But what he does next mirrors the challenge every person or business has faced when a message that goes wrong suddenly spreads like a nuclear pinata full of confetti that explodes into every corner on earth. You simply can’t pull it back.

How do you stop the unstoppable?

My first suggestion is a bit of a personal parable: The Story of the Spilled Milk. It’s a story that came to mind the first time I was asked to help someone sort out the damage of a tweet they’d posted that erroneously reported a regional company had fired its employees and closed.

The story goes like this: When my oldest son was four years old, he was watching cartoons early on a Saturday morning and wanted some milk and cereal for breakfast but didn’t want to wake up Mom and Dad. So, he attempted to pour the milk himself. The result was a gallon of milk spilled through the kitchen and under the baseboards, where it was unreachable but quickly developed into a smell that could have raised the dead. No amount of disinfectant or air freshener could touch it.

?While not ideal, we devised a stopgap strategy. We prepared a gallon of disinfectant water and poured it in the same spot the milk had spilled to create the best chance of covering the affected area with strong enough disinfectant to quell the stench.

In this same vein, I suggested posting the funny story and photos of the stacked-up shipments on the same social media platforms where he shared the original news. He can also offer the story to the conduits who covered the original news. The outlets would not likely run the stop sending message as a public service alert but might find the originality of the update entertaining and interesting enough to run follow-up segments, interview Sarkis and pave the way for future endeavors. This leads to another core crisis PR philosophy…

“So, what did that just open up for you?”

It’s a sentence often used by life coaches as a productive vantage point for bad occurrences. When the eyes of the world are upon you, what does that open up? In this case, perhaps more opportunity to reiterate what you are truly about, increasing education, innovating ways to be more earth-conscious, and when you’re in the spotlight, at least be seen and known for the things you stand for. If this can happen, it could pave the way for good news out of the very bad occurrences from a good deed gone viral and its unexpected consequences. And we could all use a little more opportunity for good news.

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