Morgan Freeman Botches Reddit IAmA - Black Eye on PR

For those not familiar with Reddit it's basically a forum where people post interesting things on a wide variety of subjects. Postings gain popularity when people 'up vote' them and become more visible in their particular subreddit (a subreddit is simply a subject category, like politics or videos).

One of Reddit's most popular subreddits is the IAmA subreddit - which allows reddit users to ask questions of various people. Over three million people subscribe to IAmA, which is also widely used by celebrities. An IAmA can last a couple hours during which Redditors (the term Reddit users call themselves) can ask the person doing the IAmA questions.

The term "IAmA" comes from the concept of "I Am A doctor, ask me anything", "I Am A movie star, ask me anything" - you get the drift. IAmA's are not just for celebrities, lots of common folks do them as well.

Recently Morgan Freeman did an IAmA and it turned into a PR mess. To make a long story short, redditors accused Reddit of faking the IAmA.

Generally for an IAmA celebrities provide photographic and/or video proof that they are who they say they are.  The moderators of the subreddit confirm that they are who they say and either post the proof for users to see or simply indicate that they have confirmed that the person answering the question is who they say they are.

Bill Gates did an IAmA two months ago and blew people's socks off. Not only did he answer questions in text-form, but he also provided video replies to some of them.

So back to Morgan Freeman though. Why did redditors go nuts after he did his IAmA?

Here are the main reasons:

• The answers he gave were basically all one liners.  Generally if you do an IAmA it's excepted that you'll give more than "yes" "no" responses. If your interest in talking with redditors is that low, why bother doing it in the first place?
    
• His Reddit user name was 'OblivionMovie'. While celebrities use IAmA's to promote their recent projects, they rarely make it so obvious that the only reason they are doing it is for such promotion. Having a user handle of Oblivion Movie, instead of say 'Morgan Freeman' was considered odd by redditors.
  
  
• There was no picture proof posted before the question period started. While this occurs regularly, as you'll see in my next point it became a problem.
  
• Two hours after the IAmA, as people started saying it wasn't Freeman who had done the IAmA, a picture was posted to prove he did. The picture is CLEARLY photoshopped.

Anyone who knows how to use Photoshop can tell you instantly that this is a fake. The photo of Freeman is for real, but the paper is fake. When you take a photo with a camera paper doesn't shine white bright the way it is in the photo. 

But as Freeman's PR team is finding out, redditors go the extra mile to prove a fake:

So what exactly happened? 

Was it Freeman who answered the questions people had or was it some PR person either working for Freeman or working for the movie studio pretending to be Freeman?

Reddit moderators had to do their own IAmA to respond to upset users.  In essence they say that it was Freeman answering questions and that the photo is not Photoshopped. 

From a PR perspective let's quickly analyze this whole situation:

From Freeman's Side:

The PR team (whether it be Freeman's or the movie studio) screwed up big time, but who really knows what happened. 

Maybe Freeman bailed out last minute and he told the PR person to just do the interview for him. 

Or perhaps he was really busy and told the PR person to come to him with the questions and he'll give answers (and then proceeded to give one sentence responses because he was really busy doing something else). 

Or perhaps he was exhausted at the end of a long day and had his PR person read him questions as he replied half asleep (which might explain why the photo they took was of him sleeping). 

Who knows, but we do know this: either Freeman gave a horrible IAmA (which is the PR person's fault for not prepping him) or the PR person did the IAmA pretending to be Freeman. 

And we know that the picture they provided as proof was FAKE. It's such a bad fake that the PR person should be fired. I mean, I laugh just thinking of someone providing that as proof and thinking it would fly. 

It's impossible to know what exactly went down, but the PR folks involved in this really screwed up. 

What the PR person should have done was cancel the IAmA if Freeman didn't have time to do it that day. It's better to cancel an IAmA than to do a crappy one, or even worse, to get accused of faking an IAmA.

From Reddit's side:

Reddit screwed up big time in all this also. They showed that, ultimately, even they can't really know who is answering the questions. After all, it's just someone at the end of a keyboard. 

While they do phone calls and emails and they can verify the celeb has agreed to the IAmA, they can't guarantee that it's the actual celeb responding. If a celeb has their PR person do the actual responses there's no way to actually know. 

Unless of course you do what Bill Gates did and provide video proof:

Gates clearly put his marketing staff to work in creating a short animated video response.

Or you can do what Gerard Butler did after his interview and leave a video message thanking redditors:

Where Reddit has screwed up is in telling redditors that the picture of Freeman has not been faked. 

In the End

In the end this one screw up isn't going to hurt Freeman's brand. People will still love his acting and his voice. But it was definitely a black eye with redditors (up to three million of them watched this unfold on reddit).

The lesson from a PR perspective is that you can't fuck around with interviews. Just because they are in a social media / networking venue doesn't mean you can dick around with them. If you agree to an interview you either show up ready to go OR you cancel the interview and reschedule. 

My gut tells me that whatever went wrong here there was a moment where the PR person had to make a call, do we kill the IAmA and reschedule (and hope Freeman agrees to the interview at a later date - although soon enough to promote the movie launch) or do we do the interview by any means necessary even though we aren't prepared. 

Listen up PR folks - ALWAYS kill the interview if you aren't ready. It's far better to skip an interview than to do a bad interview. Very few executives have the ability to go in cold to an interview and hit a home run. I've only worked with one in my time and he simply had the ability to navigate an interview perfectly regardless of whether he was ready for it or not. 

No matter how much push back you get from executives you have to kill the interview if they aren't ready for it. While they may get mad at you in the short term, in the long run you are protecting their brand and they will appreciate and understand that. And if for some reason they don't, then they aren't folks you want to be working for!

Freeman probably has no idea any of this PR mess has even happened (as I suspect Freeman doesn't spend his time on Reddit). But the movie studio and the PR folks should learn from this... don't think you can screw around with online interviews just because they aren't on camera, because you can't! You can just as easily shoot your foot off with an online interview as with any other kind.