Crisis communication

Sunday, April 13, 2008

American Airlines’ quiet launch of a crisis blog

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UPDATE: The Airline Biz blog from the Dallas Morning News includes an item about AAConversation, including quotes from Billy Sanez, the American Airlines spokesperson who evidently is the “Billy S.” who has penned the two posts that so far populate the blog. Sanez also answers questions about the use of Blogger.com.

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In the past, I’ve argued against the creation of a blog in a crisis. Having a dark blog at the ready, I have maintained for some time, is a lousy idea. In a crisis, companies are suspect. A risk-averse public eyes the organization at the center of a crisis with skepticism. Logical arguments often seem defensive in the face of the emotion a crisis can produce.

It’s much better to already have a blog, with a community of readers with whom you have built trust, that you can bring to bear when that inevitable crisis strikes. Southwest Airlines, for example, has been able to communicate with travelers through its blog during crises ranging from missed inspections to fashion issues largely because Southwest had already established the blog when no crises were imminent.

I am, however, prepared to eat my words if American Airlines’ crisis blog works.

A non-participant in the social media space, American Airlines has been hammered over the last week as thousands of flights have been canceled stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers. Rational arguments about needed inspections pale in comparison to news footage of frustrated and angry passengers spending nights in airports instead of getting to their destinations, which can include weddings, funerals, and the like. The opinion of industry analysts that the FAA is more to blame than American for unnecessarily aggressive inspection demands doesn’t seem to have quelled the anger of passengers marooned in airport terminals as canceled flights mounted.

In the face of public outrage, American has gutted it up and opened AAConversation, a plain-vanilla Blogger.com blog, with the express intent of listening. As the blog states, “We...would like to hear from you.  Please feel free to post a comment.  We will continuously monitoring the site and will post regular updates.”

The first of two posts (so far) includes a video offering step-by-step instructions on how to contact the company online; the video was uploaded to YouTube, along with another—not on the blog—of CEO Gerard Arpey addressing the cancellations. The post also includes links to other resources to help travelers.

The second post announces the airlines’ return to a regular flight schedule.

Few have commented so far, probably because American hasn’t announced the blog’s existence. One of three comments as of this posting applauds the blogging effort while another questions a return to normal: “Returning service to normal is relative when you take into account how horrible AA service is ‘normally.’” The fact that the critical comment appears at all, though, suggests American is sincere in its desire to listen.

It’s encouraging that American seems to be willing to take its hits. It will be interesting to see the company’s response to the comments—who responds and how, whether changes will be implemented based on traveler input, and how active the blog becomes now that the immediate issue has passed.

I’ll watch and cross my fingers that the American Airlines crisis blog represents a sincere effort to engage the traveling public, and if it opens a dialogue that leads to action, I’ll happily revise my assessment of crisis blogs. Stay tuned.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Crisis communication fundamentals

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Scads of books are available on crisis management and crisis communication (one of my favorites is “Now is Too Late,” by Gerald Baron, whose CrisisBlogger blog is a terrific resource on the topic). The conversation on crisis communication on yesterday’s FIR, though sparked enough interest for me to cover some of my fundamental beliefs about crises and crisis communication.

What is a crisis?

You can’t check your feeds these days without spotting an article proclaiming one incident or another a “PR crisis.” It seems that everyone from experienced journalists to neophyte bloggers have adopted “PR crisis” as a label for any problem an institution might experience. To qualify as a genuine crisis, though, there needs to be a realistic probability that the company’s reputation is at risk. On yesterday’s FIR, we used Wikipedia’s definition, but I like the one from Christine Pearson and Judith Clair that is used in the standard PR textbook, ”Effective Public Relations”:

An organizational crisis is a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly.”

My friend Wilma Mathews, co-author of the media relations book “On Deadline” and head of PR at Arizona State University, dismisses a lot of the incidents that many people would call a crisis. At dinner one night not too long after the 9-11 attacks, Wilma told me that she had been asked if she had a crisis communication plan for a terrorist attack on the campus. “That’s not a crisis,” she said, since there is no threat to the university’s reputation. “It’s an emergency.”

Types of crises

Crisis communication literature has tackled the categories of crisis a number of ways. Over the years, I have distilled these into three major categories:

• Meteor crisis—Completely unexpected, a meteor crisis falls from the sky. It’s usually characterized by randomness and senselessness and is viewed as a terrible thing. The organization affected is a victim in a meteor crisis, but nevertheless, confidence in the organization is at risk. Consider the recent shooting in an Omaha shopping mall. This was not the mall’s fault, but people may opt to shop elsewhere after the shooting. How quickly and effectively the organization responds will determine whether it is perceived as complicit or innocent.

• Predator crisis—In “The Insider,” Russell Crowe portrayed former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand, who delivered confidential company documents to “60 Minutes.” I would argue that Wigand did the right thing (others will disagree), but from the company perspective, he was a predator; that is, he was out to cause the company harm. In a predator crisis, the company is hardly a victim—it must have dirty laundry in order for a predator to air it. Other kinds of predator crises include behind-the-scenes disputes that go public, new regulations that expose safety or other shortcomings, and litigation that reveal unsavory business practices (like, for instance, an insurance company that drags its feet approving an organ transplant until the patient has died).

• Breakdown crisis—A breakdown crisis occurs when the company fails to perform. Organizations usually bring breakdown crises on themselves by taking shortcuts, deviating from ethical business practice, or showing disdain for the concerns of its constituents. Product liability lawsuits, recalls, environmental disasters, manufacturing accidents and financial scandals (Enron leaps to mind) all fit in the breakdown crisis category.

The entire discussion on FIR was kicked off by a comment from listener Michael Allison, who identified a new category that can overlay each of the three categories above: a “lingering crisis.” Michael’s example: zoo animals continuing to die over the course of several years (even if from old age or other natural causes) gave anti-zoo activists ongoing fodder to pitch to the media. This lingering crisis could fit as any of the categories above: meteor if the deaths were all natural and had nothing to do with confinement in a zoo, breakdown if some of the animals died due to a failure to comply with zoo standards (a containment wall four feet too short leading to a zoo goer’s death would fit here in a lingering crisis about animal escapes), and predator if a non-issue is made into an issue by an activist group like PETA (which did, in fact, make plenty of hay out of the situation).

Business objectives during a crisis

When handling crisis communications, your efforts should focus on achieving six main objectives:

• Maintain a positive image of the organizatwion
• Present timely, accurate, candid, up-to-date information
• Remain accessible
• Monitor communication channels to catch misinformation early
• Maintain constituent support
• Survive the crisis

Why crises escalate

The last objective listed above, while perhaps a little overly obvious, is one that many organizations forget in the short-term chaos of a crisis. The idea is to emerge from the crisis ready to continue business. A short-term focus on sales at the expense of your long-term reputation may help you make your quarterly projections but sink you over the next year and beyond.

Inside an organization, particularly those that have no crisis plans—or those that do have crisis plans but have not drilled them—you have to be prepared to deal with a variety of reactions and circumstances that lead to some bad decision making. These include…

• Surprise
• Insufficient and incorrect information (leading to some really stupid statements, the most famous of which was CBS’s erroneous reporting of Jim Brady’s death when President Reagan was shot)
• Loss of control as events escalate faster than they can be addressed
• Intense public and media scrutiny
• Adoption of a siege mentality
• Panic (leading to even more stupid statements)
• Short-term focus (like, “How do we meet our quarterly numbers while this is going on?")

These reactions can be mitigated by understanding some crisis principles and incorporating them into your communication plans and drills:

• The public attaches little credibility to business advocates—like company spokespersons—during a crisis.
• The public is risk-averse. They want to know what you’re going to do to make sure this never happens again.
• The media’s role is based on conflict. The media are not there to help you get your message out.
• Advocacy groups will exploit a conflict for their own purposes.
• Emotion, not logic, prevails.
• Symbols characterize a crisis. Dead, oil-soaked birds are the symbol of the Exxon Valdez incident, while front-line employees who lost their life savings walking out of a building with boxes holding their possessions are the symbol of the Enron crisis.

Crisis strategies

One of the most important, and oft-overlooked, crisis communication strategies is to address your constituents’ perceptions. You cannot manage a crisis, but you can manage the perceptions the crisis creates.

You should never engage in debate during a crisis. No company ever succeeded in crisis communication through a rational argument. Instead, they’re viewed as defensive and guilty.

Your organizational values are more important during a crisis than at any other time. If they’re sincere and deeply held, they can reaffirm your organization’s humanity and improve the negative perceptions the crisis has precipitated. If they’re just words on the wall (Enron leaps to mind again), they can only do you harm. Here are four steps to take at the outset of a crisis:

• Define the symbols
• Set your key messages
• Set specific objectives
• Determine the metrics you’ll use to assess your performance

Your strategies should be based on prioritizing the constituents whose interests you will address. Too many organizations adopt a shareholder value mentality (the same philosophy that governed Enron’s actions). Had Johnson & Johnson put shareholders at the top of the list, the company probably would have waited for a government recall to pull Tylenol off the shelves. Short-term sales might have been salvaged, but long-term customer confidence would have been crippled. By putting customers first, confidence was high and sales skyrocketed when the product was reintroduced with the first-ever safety cap (addressing the public’s risk-averse nature). Ultimately, shareholders benefited from being dropped near the bottom of the priority list:

• The affected party (or parties)
• Customers and consumers
• Employees
• Local communities
• Shareholders
• Government

Response guidelines

When responding to a crisis, you should…

• Respond quickly, accurately, professionally and with great care
• Treat perceptions as fact
• Acknowledge mistakes (today, we’d say, “Be transparent")
• Tailor messages to address the aggrieved or angry party
• Note the other side’s concerns; don’t be dismissive
• Make no public confrontations
• Emphasize the existing relationships in which you have built capital; they are more credible during a crisis than your own spokespersons

Of course, there’s much, much more to crisis communication than this brief summary. But if you keep these points in mind, you won’t go far wrong when facing a crisis.

Still, the two most important things you can do: Develop and maintain a crisis plan and drill it at least once each quarter with all of the company representatives who will have a role in a real crisis, including (and most importantly) the senior leadership team.

UPDATE: Ike Pigott, from the American Red Cross, sent along an addition list that I like a lot—the metrics by which he measures a PR crisis:

• Power of impact (immediate damage)
  How hard is this strike?
• Breadth of impact (duration)
  How long will it be remembered?
• Depth of impact (cleanup)
  How isolated is the damage? Is it one person’s screwup or a system failure?  Fixed with one firing or a massive review?

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

FIR Interview: John “Pat” Philbin, former FEMA Communications Director - January 9, 2008

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One of the bigger PR news stories of 2007 involved a press conference staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in October to address the California wildfires. FEMA’s External Affairs Director John “Pat” Philbin was slated to take a new position as Public Affairs Director for the Director of National Intelligence, but in the wake of the press conference controversy, that offer was withdrawn. In this wide-ranging interview, Philbin discusses the events that occurred leading up to, and the fallout from, the press conference, and offers advice for communicators who may find themselves in a similar position.

About our Conversation Partner

Pat Philbin brought more than 20 years of experience in strategic communication, public affairs, organization management and business development within government organizations to his position at FEMA, which he began in June 2006. Before joining FEMA, Philbin worked for Anteon/General Dynamics Information Technology as a Technical Director where he served as a consultant in strategic communication to the Department of Defense’s Business Transformation Agency directing and assisting in communication efforts to Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and the general public. He also served as the Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Communications for a private security firm. 

Philbin served 21 years in the U.S. Coast Guard from which he retired as Chief of Public Affairs in 2004. He holds a Doctorate in Communication from the University of Maryland, a Master of Science in Public Relations from Syracuse University, and a Bachelor of Science in Government from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He also holds an Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) and is a member of the Public Relations Society of America.

About our Guest Interviewer

Kami Watson Huyse, APR, principal of My PR Pro, an independent agency based in San Antonio, Texas, writes about public relations and communications. She has a background in crisis communication and reputation management, executing social media campaigns, conducting focus group research, and media relations. Kami has been working in public relations since 1994. She blogs at Communication Overtones.

Download the 64-minute conversation here (MP3, 29.2MB), or sign up for the Interviews RSS feed to get it and future interviews automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio or iTunes, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon.

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If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

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Friday, November 09, 2007

Clinton’s Fact Hub a model for rapid business response to rumors and inaccuracies

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Business can take a lesson from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The presidential candidate has launched a new website called The Fact Hub, designed to provide an instant response to misrepresentations and misstatements of fact. According to an article in The New York Times, even Republican strategists are applauding the move:

Steve Schmidt, a former political strategist for President Bush who helped oversee his 2004 campaign war room, said the new Clinton site was “the next evolution in rapid response.”

The site is built on a blogging platform (but without comments), enabling quick responses to inaccurate media reports and statements by opposition candidates. It has already been used to debunk a rumor that Sen. Clinton failed to leave a tip at a restaurant, a story that was picked up by a variety of media.

If you’re an anti-Hillary person, please don’t post anti-Hillary comments here. (I’m not a Clinton supporter myself.) This post isn’t about Sen. Clinton but rather the use of social media tools as a channel for quickly addressing rumors and inaccuracies. Business would be well-served to look at this example and adopt it instead of relying on less effective channels like those stodgy corporate statements we’re so accustomed to issuing.

Hat tip to Carmen van Kerckhove for the heads-up.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Dark blogs: a bad idea for crisis communication

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More and more, I hear communicators counsel their organizations and clients to maintain a “dark blog” in the wings, ready to be activated in the event of a crisis. Whether this is actually a good idea falls into that “it depends” category.

Blogging software, stripped of the elements that make it a blog (like comments and trackbacks), can be used to provide rapid updates as the crisis progresses through its various stages. If that’s the intent of a dark blog, fine.

If, however, the dark blog is designed to provide a genuine, authentic voice engaged in conversation about the crisis, this is an awful idea. The blog will have absolutely no credibility. It will have no established voice. No community will have formed around it.

Establishing a corporate blog before a crisis, on the other hand, allows an organization to build community along with some banked goodwill and trust—assuming the blog is done right in the first place. That storehouse of goodwill and trust can be used in a crisis with an audience already inclined to believe what the corporate blogger says and, to some extent, to support the organization in its trying time.

Consider the minor crisis Southwest Airlines experienced when the ejection of a scantily-clad passenger from a flight became public. Imagine starting a blog in order to engage in a dialogue with the customer base and the flying public over the issue.

Instead, Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett used the existing “Nuts About Southwest” blog—with its regular core group of readers and its established credibility—to issue an apology:

We always want to apologize if we offend any of our Customers, and we also support our Employees abilities to make decisions.  We are apologizing to Kyla, in typical Southwest style, and I hope you will click here to read about it.

The post was greeted with more than 140 comments (as of today). While the comments represent a mix of opinions, they are mostly courteous and well-thought-out, the way people talk when they are engaged in a conversation with someone they know. The ability to engage directly with those whose opinions are strongest can defuse a lot of the hostility some people may feel. The fact that they can do so on a company blog makes people feel like their opinions matter to the company. And a number of the comments do applaud Barrett for the apology, like this one:

While I think this apology should have come much earlier than it did, I’m glad to see that SWA has apologized for it’s error, and publicly admitted to the mistake.

Good job!

It does make sense to include social media—and, at this stage, blogs in particular—in your crisis communication planning. If you’re looking for an argument to support introducing a corporate blog, the benefits of two-way communication with critical audiences during a crisis could help you sell the idea. But don’t fall prey to the suggestion that launching a blog at the time of a crisis is a sound strategy.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Dress wrong and you may not be free to move about the country

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Southwest Airlines finds itself in the midst of a rare PR kerfuffle thanks to the airline’s San Diego staff, which assumed the role of fashion police by escorting a young woman off of a flight to Tucson because she was, in their opinion, too scantily clad. (She was allowed back on the plane after objecting, but only if she covered herself with a blanket.)

The passenger—a college student and Hooter’s waitress—appeared this morning on The Today Show to tell her story. As soon as I saw the segment, I pulled up the Southwest blog, “Nuts About Southwest,” and found a brief post there by Corporate Communication Manager Brian Lusk, who serves as corporate editor of the blog. The post took no position, but merely pointed to the blog of Today show producer Dan Fleschner, who appears to take Southwest’s side:

At first, when she appeared on the set, it didn’t seem like her outfit was so inappropriate. It was clear that her skirt was pretty short, but it didn’t seem worthy of getting a lecture from a customer service representative on how to dress.

But when she sat down, we learned just how short that skirt was—when she flashed our national television audience. Yeah, that skirt was short.

So there are a lot of questions here. What is appropriate dress for flying? Who should decide what is appropriate? Should airlines have a dress code? And without a dress code, can an airline block someone from flying?

NBC opted to blur the explicit image. Fleschner points readers to a poll where they could vote on whether the outfit was too risque.While poll results favor allowing the passenger—23-year-old Kyla Ebbert—to board with what she was wearing, comments support the decision.

That’s the opposite of the comments to the Southwest blog, where all but two comments are outraged; most claim they will never fly Southwest again, and some chide the airline by recalling the suggestive uniforms Southwest flight attendants wore when the airline was new. Several commenters reject Southwest’s assuming the role of fashion cop; even San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Gerry Braun snickers, “I don’t know about you, but one of my big gripes with the airlines is that they just don’t take the time to dispense fashion advice any more.” Braun’s column tells the whole story.

The last time I remember Southwest embroiled in this kind of controversy, it was over the decision to charge overweight passengers two fares to cover the cost of two seats. I doubt Southwest wants to get a reputation as the airline that judges passenger morality, but that may be unavoidable if all its controversies feature morality overtones.

To its credit, Southwest is allowing highly critical comments to appear, including one that begins, “I will write a letter to the office address given on the home page of Southwest Airlines since I am sure my comments will not be posted here or on any of the other blog topics.”

Only two of 28 comments supported Southwest’s actions. I should note that there were 28 when I first scanned the comments. When I refreshed the page, there were more than 70, suggesting that this issue could quickly spiral out Southwest’s control. There are already 55 blog posts that match the search terms Southwest Airlines Kyla.

I’m impressed that Southwest provided a place on its blog for passengers (and others) to express themselves on the issue; certainly, the conversation would have taken place elsewhere had the airline opted not to post an item. Still, I was hoping to see a statement from Southwest, by news release if not on the blog, particularly in light of one comment that noted, “When I contacted the airlines about dress code they said there is no dress code-a bikini would be fine they said as long as it covered all the right spots.”

It wouldn’t take much to suggest that the employee who threw Ms. Ebbert off the plane was acting in the airlines’ best interest but that Southwest would undertake a training or communication effort to reinforce the company’s actual policy to ensure such mistakes weren’t made again.

If you were handling PR for Southwest, what would you advise?

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Smart Skype move

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Skype has been the subject of much commentary and speculation since its outage last week, caused (according to the company) by millions of computers rebooting simultaneously after receiving a routine Windows update. Some have asserted that the two-day outage (the first of its kind since Skype launched) calls the service’s reliability into question. (For me, I wonder how reliable Ma Bell was three or so years after it was launched compared to Skype.)

In any case, Skype has made a smart move by giving all of its customers—whether they were affected by the outage or not—an additional seven days on their current subscriptions to Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail. Notifications are going out via email; I just got mine. From a PR perspective, Skype has it on the ball, taking a short-term hit (what is the cumulative value of all those subscriptions?) in order to rebuild (in some cases) or reinforce (in others) goodwill among its customers?