Tuesday, June 30, 2009
HC+T Update: June 2009
HC+T Update: June 2009
HC+T Update
June 2009
- GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
- How the approval process needs to change
- Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators
- One role for print: making dull messages stand out
- Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy
- Site Of The month
- HC+T Update
- Boilerplate and subscription information
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1. GM and social media: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
We hear that most companies still haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon and we roll our eyes in dismay and maybe even a little contempt. But there are reasons companies resist getting engaged with communities. It can be seriously perilous.
Look at General Motors. The magnitude of the company’s problems have inflamed peoples’ passions; our emotional reactions to its situation—and how GM responds—will forge its reputation for years to come.
In the midst of this classic institutional crisis, GM has committed to engage in social media at virtually every level. Say what you will about other dimensions of General Motors, from labor practices to product innovation to financial management. The companies’ communication efforts have been sincere and wide-ranging:
They were pioneers of the corporate blog. Members of the communications team participate in the auto blog communities. Communication staff have reached out to answer questions and participate in conversations wherever they are found. Employees throughout the organization have been encouraged to talk about the company’s future in conversations they encounter during their day-to-day online activities. The public was invited to join GM leaders in open conversations about controversial issues. They have hosted mommy bloggers and podcasters on a retreat. They’re on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr. To record the company’s 100-year history, they created a wiki to which anybody can contribute.
In other words, GM has put into practice the kinds of actions most social media consultants would have advised. Still, even people engaged in the space are oblivious to those efforts, even as they insist upon them. In a comment to Joe Jaffe’s blog (in response to something I wrote), Viveka Weiley wrote, “People are already having these conversations, we don’t need GM to facilitate, centralise and filter them. It’s up to them to join our conversation, not the other way around.”
Exactly what GM has been doing.
Jaffe’s post about which Viveka and I were commenting, by the way, is a savaging of GM over a 60-second spot the company unveiled concurrent with its bankruptcy filing. In the commercial, the company brands the bankruptcy as a turning point and acknowledges that a massive rethinking of the company is required. It ends with the URL for GM Re: Invention, the repository of all things related to GM’s turnaround effort.
The site shows an understanding of the networked world, with…
- Sharing links
- RSS feed
- Links to Twitter accounts of GM designers, engineers, and other front-line employees
- Link to a Facebook fan page where critical comments are a part of the conversation
I saw the video as an invitation to come to the site, one channel for engaging consumers among many. Joe things “Somebody deserves a real hefty bitch-slap” because (among other things) “advertising is not the answer….especially during times where cathartic healing needs to take place via honest…authentic, transparent and open dialogue.”
Which, again, GM has been doing to a degree few other companies—and even fewer outside the technology world—can claim.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Perhaps the best example of this peril comes courtesy of the Huffington Post, months before the bankruptcy filing. Back in February, Huffington blogger Allison Kilkenny tweeted a message to her followers: allisonkilkenny: sees GM is phasing out the small, fuel efficient Saturn. Oil companies: 1, Earth: 0.
Kilkenny was nonplussed when she got a reply: “@allisonkilkenny we don’t have indiv trash cans at ofc cubes at hq, just an ex, not sure total $ saved from small ideas, but likely large”
Kilkenny was bewildered. Why would a company needing to focus on its recovery invest in people who respond to Tweets, especially those that weren’t a specific request for help or information? “No one likes that in your rush to modernize and embrace the technology of the internet (complete with Twitter experts,) you forgot how to compete with foreign car companies,” she wrote.
So Kilkenny’s complaint, on the highly-visible Huffington Post, is that GM is doing exactly what Joe Jaffe and Viveka Weiley (and scores of others) say they must do.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Make no mistake, GM is doing the right thing, even if they’re making mistakes along the way. But knowing the kinds of hits you’ll take from both sides for stepping up as GM has would deter many a CEO from taking the social media plunge.
Measurement is key. If we cannot convince business leaders that the business results of community engagement will outweigh the kinds of risk on display with GM, it’ll be hard to condemn them for their obstinence. I have no doubt that GM’s leaders are getting regular reports on the payoff for their commitment to community engagement. Given the current climate, it’s a good thing they’re in it for the long haul.
2. How the approval process needs to change
Among the tiny early-adopter subset of the total online population, a lot of buzz is dedicated to a perceived shift from blogging to lifestreaming. Edelman Senior VP Steve Rubel, the most widely read of PR’s many participants in social media venues, has shuttered his Micro Persuasion blog in favor of a Posterous lifestream, asserting that “blogging feels old” and “publishing today is all about The Flow.” (More on this in an upcoming post.)
In the real world, though, communicators employed by companies struggle to overcome a phalanx of obstacles to the most basic of online engagement. One such obstacle about which I keep hearing is the institutionalized content approval process. I was with an organization recently in which the simple concept of blogging was confounding in light of the fact that every word that goes public is subject to a daunting round of approvals.
Before most organizations can join Steve and the other innovators and early adopters at the vanguard of social media, they will need to come to terms with era of the 140-character news cycle and establish processes and cultures that allow communicators (and others) to communicate effectively, unhindered by vestiges of outdated and archaic policies.
The approval process that became the standard in most organizations is based on several assumptions:
- Employees who are charged with creating content, such as press releases and authoritative statements of record, don’t know enough to avoid saying things that could cause problems for the company. Therefore, those who are in the know must vet the document in order to minimize the risk.
- The vetting process is designed to scrub the content clean for external consumption.
- Adequate news cycles exist that ensure there is enough time for the document to wend its way through the various layers of approval. A press release updating a crisis, for example, didn’t need to be in the hands of the media until 15 minutes before the 6 p.m. newscast.
Neither of the last two points is valid any longer, which requires organizations to think differently about how they address the first one.
First, the messages delivered internally are subject to external scrutiny, like it or not. While some organizations have awakened to the need for transparency, all organizations are having transparency thrust upon them. The line between internal and external communications is blurring. Communications to any audience need to be considered from this perspective at the time they’re crafted.
Second, there are no more news cycles (or, as I like to say, they’ve been reduced to 140 characters). Given the speed and volume of information filling the conversation space, the time it takes to process content through an approval process is time during which thousands of other messages can define your story and shape the public’s opinion. Especially in a crisis, you need to get your information into the mix now.
Given these realities, how does an organization prevent the communication of a message that contains inaccuracies, regulatory boo-boos and inconsistencies with the official company position? The answer, in most cases, is to alter the thinking about approvals from reactive to proactive. Rather than wait for each bit of content to be created, those tasked with communicating on behalf of the organization need to have a series of sit-downs with Legal, Regulatory Affairs and all the other specialists in order to be trained on the issues that could cause the company grief. Done well, this would leave lawyers and others confident that these communicators will produce problem-free content. They’ll also be confident that communicators will seek out their counsel when they’re not sure whether something they’re planning to say is problematic.
Ultimately, a new view of the role of internal communications can have largely the same result with all employees, not just the communicators.
But make no mistake: Before organizations can catch up to where the Steve Rubels and Stowe Boyds of the world were even two years ago, issues like the approval process will need to be addressed first.
3. Next Webinar: SEO for Communicators
The beginners’ crash course in Search Engine Optimization
with Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, July 20
Webinar Cost: US $195
Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit
Highly reputable people are asserting that SEO—search engine optimization—could ultimately replace PR agencies. Meanwile, larger PR agencies and media companies are acquiring SEO boutiques.
At the very least, communicators need to have a foundation in SEO today just as much as they needed to understand desktop publishing two decades ago.
In this introductory course, you’ll learn the basics of SEO as it relates to communications; we’ll focus specifically on the dimensions of SEO that communicators need to incorporate into all their online efforts. You’ll learn…
- The importance of keywords and how to choose the right ones
- How metadata can drive better search results
- Critical elements fore any web page
- The ethics of SEO, and how not to violate them
- How to use web analytics to improve your SEO efforts
- SEO for press releases
- SEO behind the firewall, on your intranet
If SEO is brand new territory for you and you want to get up to speed in a hurry, this five-week course is for you! This Webinar will include a variety of multimedia elements including videos, audio, and screencasts, along with text.
As with all Shel Holtz Webinars, you’ll have access to a treasure trove of online resources and downloadable handouts. The new interface makes participating in the conversation simpler than ever, and voting in each lecture’s poll has become a lot easier, too.
If you have not participated in one of Shel’s webinars before, visit the site at http://www.shelholtzwebinars.com and watch the introductory video. Webinars consist of five lectures, with a new lecture posted each Monday for five weeks. Lectures consist of a mix of text, audio, and sometimes video…but you don’t need anything more than your web browser. Webinars are asynchronous —- that is, they do not take place in real time. That means you can drop in whenever it’s convenient for you —- there’s no place you have to be on any particular day or time.
Webinar cost is U.S. $195.
Register: http://bit.ly/38aEit
4. One role for print: making dull messages stand out
Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.
Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.
Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.
Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.
But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?
The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.
Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.
Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”
I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.
Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.
5. Ending the “Deny-delay-defend” crisis strategy
In the countless battles between communicators and corporate attorneys over what to say in response to reputation-threatening situations, the lawyers’ advice to say nothing (or little) usually prevails.
The result is often disastrous for the organization, but CEOs and senior leaders presume that mitigation of legal risk is of paramount concern. Industry pundits often agree, arguing that corporations are legal entities, requiring leaders to sweep legal concerns under the rug.
There is no need to characterize this situation as a battle between PR and Legal, however. The fact is that, viewed strictly through the legal prism, the counsel coming from corporate attorneys is frequently bad legal advice. The reasons bad advice comes from the general counsel’s office:
- In a crisis, lawyers are no less inclined to jerk their knees and make bad decisions than any other unprepared member of senior management
- Law schools do a lousy job of equipping their graduates to address the long-term consequences of short-sighted legal counsel
Still, bad legal advice is followed with barely a thought simply because it’s coming from a lawyer who has a seat at the management table. In far too many organizations, management does not share that same level of built-in trust with its top communicators.
-Bad advice
The typical advice from legal counsel—silence or something close to it—is usually designed to minimize the risk of judgments awarded to plaintiffs in lawsuits filed in the wake of whatever situation prompted the statement in the first place. That same silence, however, is construed as guilt by a risk-averse public, which can have consequences far more dire than a large judgment. Stakeholders are inclined teo assume the worst about companies in a crisis, so they lose confidence when they resort to typical non-responses.
This isn’t opinion. In a study conducted 12 years ago, the year-end closing stock prices of companies that experienced crises were compared. Those that responded well saw their share value 4%, then rebound and remain 7% above their pre-crisis close, while those responded badly (that is, did what their lawyers told them to do) experienced initial declines of 10% with share prices remaining down, closing the year 15% below pre-crisis levels. That’s a 22% difference in year-end share value between companies that responded honestly and candidly versus those lawyered up over the possibility of lawsuits.
(The Oxford Executive Research Briefing that reported these findings is detailed in this Wharton Leadership Digest, a PDF file.)
Another study, this one from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that companies taking responsibility in a crisis outperformed those that blamed someone else by 14-19%.
Expressing regret, apologizing, and acknowldging blame (if there’s blame to acknowledge) do more than help a company’s reputation, though. They actually produce better legal results. While this flies in the face of conventional wisdom—that same conventional wisdom that drives CEOs to buy into the say-nothing strategy promoted by their attorneys—just isn’t supported by the facts. Just ask Jim Golden.
Golden served as general counsel for a company in the trucking industry, a litigation-prone business if ever there was one. He practiced what he calls the “deny-delay-defend” approach to crises, but has since concluded tehat the legal results are far better if companies embrace the responses so often advanced by their PR advisers. Golden, now a negotiation counsel for a Tennessee law firm, says that doing the right thing and telling the truth results in fewer cases going to trial and smaller judgments from those cases that do make it to the inside of a courtroom.
In those cases that do go to trial, Golden says, juries believe that justice has already been done and see no bad guys in the case; there’s nothing left to be proven in court. Golden’s clients that have taken this approach have had their insurance premiums reduced by up to 30%.
This isn’t just Golden’s experience. A study of doctors accused of malpractice found that those who apologized for the outcome (without necessary taking blame) experienced fewer trials and lower settlements. That’s counterintuitive to the legal advice most doctors get, to keep their mouths shut so the lawyers can deal with it in court.
Blame law schools
Golden—who recently participated in an FIR Live discussion on lawyers and communicators—blamed law schools for the deny-delay-defend tactic. Corporate counsels, Golden says, “don’t know their options” because law schools aren’t presenting them. Mid-career attorneys, however, are increasingly seeking training on just those options, with bar associations and litigation departments bring the training in-house.
In the meantime, communicators can do a better job of making the case against deny-delay-defend by pointing out that there are more options than saying nothing (what the lawyers prefer) and self-destructive blathering (what the lawyers fear). According to Fred Garcia, founder and president of crisis management firm LOGOS Consulting Group—and another guest on the recent FIR Live—there’s a lot of room to maneuver in between those two extremes.
It would help, though, if the top communicator’s views were held in the same regard as the top legal counsel. A Financial Post article suggests that’s not the case, with communications relegated to middle management where they don’t have leadership’s ear:
“Whether it is due to arrogance, entitlement or a sense of invulnerability among senior executives, as one expert suggests, the reality is that many kings of the corporate world no longer put communications at the top of their agenda. Such isolation has made them more vulnerable to crisis.”
It is this inattention to the reputational issues at the heart of communications’ agenda that has led (at least in part) to “the AIG spa scandal, the car manufacturers’ jet debacle and the bonus blowup,” the Post article concludes.
We in communications have been talking about that seat at the management table for at least as long as I’ve been in the profession—more than 30 years. The obvious approach to securing that seat is to prove the bottom-line value of our counsel. But I’m curious: What’s your approach to being taken as seriously as the lawyers in your organization?
6. Site of the Month
Posterous is getting a fair amount of attention ever since PR uberblogger Steve Rubel decided to abandon his longtime blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of a Posterous blog. With Posterous, you can post anything from the website or via email—even from your phone. It’s being touted for its ability to let you maintain a “flow,” but I’m skeptical…and planning a blog post about it. Still, it’s worth looking at.
Posterous: http://www.posterous.com
Steve Rubel’s Lifestream: http://www.steverubel.com
7. HC+T update
- I have posted two of my recent presentations—both audio and PowerPoint deck, so you can follow along. “Social Media and Crisis Communications” from the SNCR NewComm Forum is here: http://bit.ly/10dOo7. “The News Release in the Social Media Era” from IABC’s 2009 World Conference is here: http://bit.ly/lr2EW
- I’ll be helping an internally-known healthcare institution strategize their social media activities over a two-day engagement at the end of July
- I’m working with a hospital to develop social media policies and guidelines for employees
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