Internal Communication

Don't keep employees out of the loop

Many businesses plan for ways to communicate with the public and media during crises, while neglecting internal communication plans. While obviously external communication is important, well-informed employees are a necessity for proper crisis management.

In this quote from a New York Examiner article, PR pro Phill Mann explains why:

Consider this: If a chemical plant in New Jersey has an explosion, are you more likely to seek out – and trust – information issued by the company, or from your neighbor who works at the plant? How will you feel if your neighbor tells you, “I have no idea what’s going on. They haven’t told me a thing?”

Who will more likely embrace the challenge of helping the company rebound after a crisis subsides: a well-informed employee or one left in the dark?

Who will more likely Tweet or post accurate, on-message information – a well-informed employee or one who was told nothing beyond, “Keep quiet”?

The basic thinking is this: some percentage of employees will break the rules, including those regarding things like confidentiality and social media. If information is going to get out from sources other than official spokespeople, it's better that it be the right information. In addition, ensuring that employees are informed inspires much higher confidence and in turn better productivity, never a small thing in business.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

The Big T

Don't be caught off guard

You've signed up on Twitter and things are going well. You're posting links to events, useful information, and company blogs, perhaps even beginning to interact with some active stakeholders when suddenly you notice your company name and #FAIL are appearing in many of the same posts.

A crisis is breaking, but you aren't sure what to do. This is, after all, the Big T, and you're new here. Luckily, the Internet is full of resources to help, including this list from media training expert Jane Jordan-Meier of "Five Rules for Managing Twitter When a Crisis Strikes:"

1. Act Fast: Has always been thus, but now it is a MUST. Organizations MUST, MUST, MUST respond within one hour of the news breaking.
2. Monitor Early and Often: Even a simple Google alert will help. And there is a vast array of social monitoring tools out there.
3. Have a Triangular Approach Ready: If the situation escalates out of Twitter, use three different methods of communicating to your key stakeholders in a crisis – Twitter, your website or blog and at least one key media outlet.
4. Remember We’re Human: We as humans are still incredibly irrational, and constantly make decisions based on our intuition, or whatever we feel like at that moment. We will construct our stories according to our reality.
5. Don’t Just Listen – Hear: Twitter and social media in general are very empowering and powerful motivators when others want to silence us. Iran and Egypt are just two that come to mind. In a crisis, we want someone to hear us, someone to care.

On one end, technology has driven crisis communication with the ever-increasing need for speed. On the other, the sheer volume of daily impersonal communication makes that human touch ever more powerful.

Find your way to use tech to deliver this touch via Twitter, and you've found the winning combination that will not only see you through crises, but attract and keep active followers.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Recovering from Social Media Crises

Mistakes happen - fix them with a plan

While Twitter and Facebook  are great at attracting potential customers rapidly (potential being the operative word), you can lose them just as rapidly via a silly or careless remark.

Just weeks earlier one of the bosses of a PR firm got annoyed with negative remarks being dished out by journalists (isn’t that their job?) about their client’s video game and tweeted a rather angry response. Something along the lines that he would be reviewing who would be getting the next game release.

Triple whoops! Journalist swooped on him and criticism of the game transferred to criticism of his remark. The result? The video game manufacturer sacking the PR firm, issuing an apology to journalists. The PR boss not only had to apologise to journalists, his staff and his firm but he also had to make quite clear that the tweet was his own work and not the viewpoint of his firm. The fallout and damage to the reputation of the firm could linger for a long-time.

Scenarios like the one described in this quote from a 79PR article are marring reputations on an almost-daily basis. While you can thoroughly check the credentials of whoever is responsible for running your social media campaigns, anyone operating on knee-jerk reactions is headed for trouble.

A social media crisis management plan serves not only as a set of guidelines, but checks and balances to make sure things don't get out of control. Negative attention from journalists is basically a given in business, and a good written plan would have omitted the part about posting comments that embarrass one's employer and self, perhaps instead offering ways to reach out to doubtful media sources.

As far as recovering from the crisis, the game publisher was right to cut ties with the PR firm, but could have taken things further to really turn this crisis into a positive situation. Because they already had the attention of journalists (albeit negative), it would have been the perfect time to create a campaign that invited and encouraged reviewers to give the game a fresh look.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Twitter Hashtags Evolving

Back in 2008, I suggested that an eyewitness tag on Twitter, such as #EW, would help people identify relevant material from the vast torrent of tweets that were being posted about Mumbai.

In 2011, Twitter users have taken things beyond my rather simple idea by organising a number of separate hashtags to relay information.

Rather than only using one hashtag (#Mumbai) as many people did three years ago, today the Twitter users of Mumbai have started posting to:

1. #mumbaiblasts, for information relevant to the attacks
2. #here2help, for people who can offer assistance
3. #needhelp, for people who are in need of assistance
4. #mumbaitraffic, for updates on the transport situation

This quote, from a FrontLine Club blog post by media researcher Daniel Bennet, explains how users are evolving the extremely simple "hashtag" method, used on Twitter to enable fellow users to search out posts by keyword.

Major disasters, both natural and man-made, have pushed this evolution due to the sheer numbers of people that turn to Twitter for crisis communication. Without these more specific tags, finding relevant information during a major crisis would be a needle-in-haystack exercise.

You can take advantage of these advanced tags for business as well. Try creating one for special events and asking fellow promoters or sponsors to use it on their Twitter feeds. Hopefully this will result in regular users discussing the event picking it up as well, allowing anyone searching for the information to find it with ease.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Digital Crises

New study shows pervasive lack of preparedness

Burson-Marsteller, the global public relations firm, has just released a study surveying corporate perceptions of the state of crisis communications in the age of social and digital media. It amounts to a wake-up call for business leaders who defend reputations and brand equity in today’s digitally connected marketplace.

The survey canvassed more than 800 business leaders in the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. An overwhelming majority of them—79%—said they believe their company is less than 12 months away from as potential “bet the company” crisis moment. Most of them believe that that crisis will arise from within the online space. Corporate leaders in nearly every industry, regardless of size or geography,- acknowledge that the dark clouds of impending digitally fueled crises are gathering. They also believe they know with some certainty how soon a crisis will occur—within the next year.

Yet, despite that conviction, most are still totally unprepared to manage and emerge successfully from crises fueled by a digitally powered news cycle. Nearly half of those surveyed said they lack even a basic form of effective online reputation monitoring. Not only are they not prepared, they don’t even have the most rudimentary tools to know if their reputations are under assault.

This quote, from an excellent Forbes blog post by global digital strategist Dallas Lawrence, gives telling insight into attitudes involving digital crises. Polls and studies have long revealed the fact that, while most organizations understand the need for crisis management, far fewer actually put it into action, and apparently the rise of social media hasn't changed that much.

The study mentioned, available at the Burson-Masteller website, goes on to reveal many more contrasts between understanding and action, such as 66% stating they "believe new media has significantly increased the potential cost of a crisis," while only 47% have increased internal resources for crisis response.

If you were told someone would break into your home within the next year, would you up the security? Looking at these figures, a lot of business owners would just sit and wait for it to happen.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Culture Crisis

Stop the spread of negative corporate culture

The spectacular collapse of the News of the World following the exposure of a multitude of criminal actions within the organization holds many lessons, perhaps one of the greatest of which was discussed by Jonathan Hemus in an Insignia Talks blog post:

Your corporate culture has the power to create or prevent crisis

Reports from ex-News of the World journalists and other sources indicate that reporters were under enormous pressure to come up with the next scoop, whatever it took.  This would likely lead to an atmosphere where the end result is all that matters: this is exactly the culture in which crises can flourish.

In a corporate environment, similar issues can arise.  A blinkered focus on the bottom line – “I don’t care how you do it, just hit the number” – or an unwillingness to hear about problems which may hint at broader failings - “just sort it out” – are examples of this.

The best crisis management is crisis prevention: this requires leaders to set and exemplify the right culture.

This problem has run rampant in reporting as the 24/7 Web news cycle puts ever-heavier demands on reporters to grab more eyes than the competition.

Reporting is not the only business that is at risk from this behavior, though. In recent history, we have only to look at the massive financial and real estate crises to see where cultures of "improve the bottom line at all costs" led to devastating financial damage for all involved, and nearly-irreparable reputation damage for many banks and investment groups.

As part of your crisis management upkeep, it pays to periodically do a culture assessment in order to learn more about your own organization. If you don't like the direction things are headed in, define where you would like to be and start the change in mindset from the top down.

It's not easy, but it could be the difference between success and failure.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Reputation Threat: Negative Comments Online

Your reputation is at risk when negative posts start to appear

A new study is backing up a precept that crisis management professionals have been talking about for years - negative online comments have a measurable effect on an organization's reputation.

PR Daily recently interviewed the study's organizer, doctoral student Bo Kyung Kim, who explained his test like this:

Kim conducted the study by first measuring participants’ baseline perceptions of four auto companies. Then they read a news story about a crisis each company was enduring and answered the same questions about their perceptions of the companies.

Next, participants read negative online comments—from victims of each crisis and from the unaffected public—on Facebook, Twitter, and other online message boards in response to each crisis situation. They then answered questions about their perceptions about the company.

All negative comments affected the participants’ views of the organizations, but comments from victims had the greatest effect. As a result, Kim suggested companies pay closer attention to comments made by perceived victims than those from anonymous sources.

“We found that negative messages created by victims significantly increased the negative reputation of an organization, and were more likely to result in boycotts against the organization than when it was sourced to unaffected individuals,” she said.

The fact that the public does give significant credence to these messages means that organizations should, in the vast majority of cases, make an effort to reply.

Especially when broadcast via social media channels, a complaint actually presents an opportunity for organizations to show publicly that they do care, and are willing to rectify mistakes or correct problems in order to keep stakeholders safe and happy.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Caught on Film

Your most embarrassing moments immortalized

Video has made the transition into the Internet age easily, thriving in the culture of fast news, social sharing and smartphones. Of course, this means that when public figures slip up, it's not only talked about, but also seen by millions of people.

"Mr. Media Training," Brad Phillips, has collected the very worst (and usually most entertaining) recorded gaffes from this past month, and presents them in his, "Five Worst Video Media Disasters." Here's the winner:

#1: Anthony Weiner’s Offensive PR Offensive

Not fair, Anthony Weiner. Your self immolation was so spectacular, no one on this list even had a chance of catching up with you. After getting caught sexting naughty photos to strangers, Mr. Weiner:

1. Denied the charges, claiming his account had been hacked.
    
2. Said that although he hadn’t sent the photos, he couldn’t rule out “with certitude” that the erect undies shot was of him.
    
3. Held a tearful press conference to admit he had sexted the photos himself, but would refuse to resign.
    
4. Watched helplessly as a nude photo of his…ahem…member…was released.
    
5. Saw his private news about his wife’s early-term pregnancy announced to the world.
    
6. Saw yet another batch of sexy gym photos released.
    
7. Resigned in shame.

Although his two press conferences were also dreadful, this month’s winning losing video belongs to Mr. Weiner’s first defiant hallway interview, in which he sanctimoniously blasted reporters.



The lesson here is that Internet videos never truly go away. Even if an embarrassing video is deleted from the original posting site, there's an extremely high probability that it's saved somewhere and can be drudged up under the right conditions.

If you do find yourself in this position, one approach to crisis management that has proved effective is to respond with a video of your own. While the problem footage will still exist, the idea is to bring your side of the story, or even an apology, to the same eyes that saw the original.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Dissent in the Ranks at RIM

Negative communication culture leads to public blowup

I have lost confidence.

While I hide it at work, my passion has been sapped. I know I am not alone -- the sentiment is widespread and it includes people within your own teams.

Mike and Jim, please take the time to really absorb and digest the content of this letter because it reflects the feeling across a huge percentage of your employee base. You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects.

Before I get into the meat of the matter, I will say I am not part of a large group of bitter employees wishing to embarrass us. Rather, I believe these points need to be heard and I desperately want RIM to regain its position as a successful industry leader. Our carriers, distributors, alliance partners, enterprise customers, and our loyal end users all want the same thing...for BlackBerry to once again be leading the pack.

This is an excerpt from an open letter to RIM leadership, published on the tech news site Boy Genius Report and picked up across the Web. A perfect example of a crisis that can get exposed by poor internal communication, the letter goes on to reveal the RIMs shortcomings as a company, which may well play a role in its recent market decline.

When employees do not feel free to speak openly and honestly, you risk them venting some other way, and more and more these "other ways" are becoming national news stories thanks to the power of the Web.

As part of your crisis prevention planning, ask this question, "Are we creating a culture of 'Yes Men'"? You want...no, need, the questioner, the one asking, "why is someone else doing it better?," not a group of people patting each other on the back as the company goes down in flames.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

Vulnerability Audits

Find your Achilles Heel(s)

A vulnerability audit is one of the most powerful crisis management tools available. Designed to ferret out unknown dangers or flaws in crisis planning, this test will allow you to shore up your defenses before a crisis actually hits. 

Susan Tellem, of Tellem Worldwide, was kind enough to allow us to reprint her excellent "Short Form Vulnerability Audit," the results of which may raise hairs on the necks of many organizational CEOs:

Take this vulnerability audit and see if you need help getting your business on a crisis track.

1. Who is on your crisis team? (Pick people who can think on their feet, are good spokespeople and have related experience - do not choose the CEO.)
2. Do you have friends in your court of you need them? This would include reporters/regulators/inspectors/politicians/police, etc.
3. Do you honestly monitor possible problems that could lead to a crisis like employee relationships, safety issues, confidentiality issues or termination problems? 
4. Do you have a written book of company policies?
5. Do you have a list of emergency numbers/cell phones to be able to reach managers/owners at a second's notice?
6. Who is you spokesperson if something negative happens?
7. How do you handle belligerent employees?
8. How do you handle sexual harassment accusations?
9. Are you familiar with emergency response teams in your area?
10. When was the last time that you had an emergency evacuation drill?      

While this is a very solid list, it consists only of generic questions that apply to every business. Stop and think about how many questions you could ask specific to your industry or location and you can begin to see how in-depth a complete vulnerability audit is, and how powerful it can be as a crisis prevention method.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/