How The Hell Is This My Fault?

With that said, no company with AirBnB's business model can publicly say they will assist victims whatever the cost. It's just impossible. It would be a blatant lie. They must at least maintain some sort of windshield against insurance frauds, and doing that requires tons of hard PR and legal decisions to be made, and the assistance of lawyers. And everyone hates lawyers. Companies are sometimes inherently good, sometimes not, but they should never be inherently so stupid as to sign their own commercial/financial/legal doom. You can get up from bad PR, but you can't get up from bankrupcy.

Now after this argument in favor of an actual public silence, let's see what we have: 1) a victim 2) there is no 2. There is a victim and that's all.

Just fix the victim. No need to go through internet flamewars or PR messes, no need to even listen to that. Airbnb should just send a team of 24/7 dedicated people with quasi carte blanche (within what the company can afford, of course) to see through that victim gets better, if that objective can even be met. If the "get better" project goes so wrong as to lead to law suits or whatnot, then let justice decide, because in the end, yes, someone has to pay for what happened, and the legal system is here to decide who should pay.

Now about PR: switch the debate from a "what did AirBnB do in that situation" witch-hunt to "This is what we are doing, this is how it's going from our point of view, now what do you (Mr/Mrs Customer) think we could improve on?". Open a public discussion on your social network and dedicate someone to analyze public input. And use it the next time something like this happens (because unfortunately, it will happen again). Centralize this debate somewhere where you can handle all this information, and by "handle" I don't mean "censor" but of course "assimilate".

...and just ignore those stupid emergent flame wars between big internet guns who are mostly in for pride (white knights & trolls) and money (journalists, consultants, lobbyists & investors). Let them deal with the crap they fling around themselves, and keep focusing on the "get better" project: the victim asked specifically for your help, and that's what really matters here.

Related link: an analysis of an excellent online PR crisis management by Monoprix (in French only, sorry) http://guybirenbaum.blogitexpress.com/91728/html The "victim" (an employee who got fired for taking home unsold & trashed goods) explained that he "tried hard to make a fuss and a buzz" of his situation because he felt that nothing short of prosecution and trial could make him feel better. This is a case of a failing "get better" project with exemplary PR - and to be honest, it's only when the project fails that PR become important. What did Monoprix do? They centralized the debate on their Facebook page, switched the focus from "Monoprix is bad" to a laconic "here's what we are doing, tell us what we can improve on" and they have dedicated Community Managers assimilating and discussing the comments instead of censoring them.

PG is a thinking man, and an effective one at that. Reading (not that deeply) between the lines, clearly every sensible person initially "has doubts" about the concept, but then apparently meeting the team is supposed to address those doubts.

Sounds like the AirBnB team are excellent as bs'ing people.

And dear PG:

Cheering for AirBnB to become as big as eBay circa 2009's business plan seems to indicate that even the adults here were not giving any weight to the safety and security issues inherent in an eBay scale operation. I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts about this topic (if any) that informed your decision.

Why don't they understand this? Why are they not incredibly active on this and other forums? Have they no conscience? Do they really not care? Is this really still seen by them as a PR problem rather than a a horrible event that they at least partially enabled and thus should feel terrible about and seek to help the victim in any and all ways they can?

The success of eBay, a P2P business, was initially driven by its community, and members treated each other with respect and were happy to trade with each other. AirBnB is behaving as if it doesn't care about its community, its customers.

Is that the death knell sounding? Perhaps. To me the only recourse now is a new person or team at the top, folks that actually live the desired values of the company.

Nothing incredible there - had these attempts been made in writing/email then there would be no arguing about what was/was not said.

Lesson: Do your shady dealing in person. Failing that, do it with an unscheduled phone call.