Rockies need to soothe fans, PR experts say

Joanne Kelley, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The best way for the Rockies to make up for the ticketing debacle comes down to this: winning.

But even then, crisis communications advisers say the team's management needs to find a way to assuage the many fans who got caught without tickets despite wasting hours in vain.

Making matters worse was the official reaction from the Rockies, who repeatedly suggested the problem lay with the online vendor they used to sell tickets or some unexplained "external malicious attack."

"Winning goes a long way to soothe a fan," said Larry Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, a Louisville-Ky.-based consulting firm. "But it wouldn't hurt to think about some sort of extra promotion early next season."

Public relations and crisis management experts say often the bigger problem comes with what businesses do after they've made a blunder.

"A lot of the anger that consumers have is given more justification by how the company reacts to that anger," said Steven Silvers, principal at GBSM.

By repeatedly referring to the problems encountered by Paciolan, the company handling the sale, the Rockies essentially "dismissed fan anger as being misplaced," Silvers said. "Now, they've left a lot of people very angry about how they reacted to the problem."

On top of that, fans have little interest in who else might be to blame.

"They care about the Rockies and they don't look at this as any party other than the team being responsible," said Mark Ganis, president of SportsCorp Ltd., a sport business consultancy in Chicago. "The Rockies can say they're frustrated but the fans don't really care about that either."

Ganis said the process would leave "a very bad taste in people's mouths," particularly because there's a "perception of incompetence" rather than merely a quick sellout of tickets.

If nothing else, the Rockies need to start offering some explanations to fans.

"They really haven't answered the very first question of why are they selling their tickets this way and then they can't say why it didn't work," GBSM's Silvers said.

The Rockies decision not to use a lottery for selling tickets differed from the approach taken by other teams.

"It's difficult to second-guess because every circumstance is different," said Rob Matwick, vice president of communications for the Detroit Tigers, which sold World Series tickets last year through a lottery system.

Some say it might be too soon for a rush to judgment.

"We weren't there and we don't know what happened," said Paul Raab, senior vice president for Linhart Public Relations. "Baseball club owners as a breed are people that fans love to hate."