Managing Crisis: Bad PR Is Only A Symptom

Any time a crisis involves a natural disaster, environmental catastrophe, or drawn-out tragedy, there is only one point of discussion.

When is it going to stop?

Transparency? It doesn't matter. Who is at fault? It doesn't matter. Is the federal government doing enough? It doesn't matter.

Sure, those questions are bound to be asked and asked again. Thirty-seven days is a long time to be in the midst of a crisis with multiple events. And during that time, when specific event coverage can no longer hold viewer interest, investigations start and second tier questions bubble up. But all stories always come back to that singular question. When is it going to stop?

It's the primary reason that for any communication offered up by one of the world's largest energy companies, it always circles back to live shots of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the ocean floor. It always ends with oil washing up on the shore. It always comes back to the impact on animals and sea life or the disruption of life for residents who live within the path.

This isn't "Obama's Katrina" as some people like to call it. Katrina was over, from the time it was upgraded to a tropical storm, in five days.

The oil spill is not an event. It's multiple events.

If there is one fatal flaw in the communication strategy by BP, the Obama administration, and dozens of other vested and guilty parties, it is that they have neglected to see the obvious. This crisis is not a singular event. It's a multiple event crisis, with each event requiring a different set of answers for first tier questions.

• Provide updates and estimates related to the time and date of the event.
• Determine the what, when, where, how, and why.
• Determine who will be involved and to what extent.
• Determine the public or environmental risk of each event.
• Determine the extent of any property damage and loss of life.
• Determine which authorities will be on the scene of each event.
• Estimate and create action plans when each specific crisis will be resolved.
• Keep providing updates, with any positive outcomes, until it is resolved.

Isolating each event related to the crisis is critical if anyone hopes to manage it. Otherwise, the culmination of unrelated events will overwhelm any singular or tag team entity much like Toyota's sometimes unrelated recalls that eventually added up into a company that lost its way.

As a visual, the greater mass of the oil crisis might be likened to a giant blob that BP is attempting to hold up on its own while other vested parties stand by hoping for the best. It's not possible. Crisis and communication blobs do not act like solid mass. They act more like oil. It slips. It drips. And eventually it will coat everyone involved. It doesn't matter who gets more soiled.

Instead, the entire crisis needs to be broken up into parts. There is the leak, which was the initial cause of the crisis. There is the oil that has already seeped into the ocean, killing wildlife, damaging fishermen, and halting tourism. There are scores of smaller events that impact specific ecosystems, local communities, and residents.

The first tier priority is to stop the leak. Until then, nothing else matters.


The second tier, which occurs simultaneously, is to contain the spread of the oil and disperse it. BP is managing this effort, but relying on support from the Coast Guard and hired local fishermen. The results to date are mixed, with some unexpected consequences to the individuals exposed to chemicals.

The third tier are the dozens of events that occur anywhere oil washes up on shore. BP is attempting to mange this aspect of the spill as well. It's clearly not working, with impacted states beginning to take the heat for not doing enough.

A reorganization of the entire process is badly needed. BP clearly needs to focus its energy on stopping the leak. The federal government needed to and still needs to step up responsibility and take action on mitigating the the impact of the oil that has already escaped instead of attempting to armchair quarterback the scene with conflicting messages. And local state governments ought to have taken the lead on individual events, with support from various environmental groups, to keep the beaches clear and clean up as the oil made landfall.

Sure, BP could still act as consultants on the second and third tier events, increasing its presence as each event is resolved. And they ought not to be acting alone. Some of the companies that have a partial responsibility are all but silent on the issue.

And the blame game? Who cares about that?

Considering the amount of oil that has spilled into the Gulf Coast, the top kill solution (if it works) is only the beginning of the environmental events to come. The blame will eventually come to light as investigations continue. What will also be the subject of great debate is why the federal government sought to look like it was in control early on, but then demonstrated only a presence.

Public relations alone cannot solve such a crisis alone. Neither can the various boycotts. If anything, boycotts could make the situation worse despite the reasons some people say to move ahead.

Healthier ways to participate in the crisis at this time include any number of efforts. One beneficiary of a satirical Twitter account BPGlobalPR is to raise funds for the Gulf Restoration Network. The boycotts, if any, can wait until after the spill.

Public relations is always reliant on the actual plan.

When any plan to deal with a crisis is bad, the symptom is improper communication. For its part, BP has attempted to keep communication channels flowing, but it is clearly holding back. They seem to be focused on a singular thought that if they fix everything and then prove themselves to be only partly to blame, then they may be able to justify the clean green logo.

However, as Geoff Livingston points out, that is not the case. He writes that the collective "crisis PR has been terrible with missteps on resolution, horrific transparency on possible solutions, false accounting of actual daily oil spill amounts, the policing of beaches to prevent media reporting, bickering between BP and the EPA, dispersants’ negative impact, a new climate bill that endorses further off-shore drilling, 19 new off-shore drilling licenses since Deep Horizon, etc., etc., on and on."

He says the crisis might be insurmountable for the company. I'm not sure yet, but only because BP is much more than BP. BP is Castrol, Arco, Aral, am/pm, and even the Wild Bean Cafe. It's also a leader in biofuel technology. It's investing in solar technology. It's investing in wind. It's investing in emerging coal conversion technologies. And the list goes on.

You won't read about many of these efforts for the time being. BP is smart enough to keep the focus where is belongs, but there is more to the company than meets the eye. Where it is less adept, obviously, is in its ability to work beyond its internal sphere. Perhaps they think they are too big to do that nowadays. But they are not the only ones.

Generally, in the past, sometimes the federal government would be slow to take charge and delegate a national disaster. But ultimately, the federal government would. This time around, the crisis plan matches the PR plan. Every stakeholder in the oil spill crisis has its own message. And while it is said in many different ways, the underlying theme is "not me."

Other voices around the Web with a focus on communication.

• The Dirty Business of BP's Corporate Reputation Clean Up by Jennifer Janviere.
• Its Fake Twitter Stream Has Twice the Followers of the Real Thing by Jim Edwards
• How Not To Get “Brandjacked” Like BP Global PR by Olivier Blanchard

Losing Bounce: OfficeMax Customer Service

Last year, a customer service issue left me with the resolve to always visit Office Depot before OfficeMax. The issue was a small thing.

When we were loading my car with new office chairs, I noticed they were brown and not black. They were out of black, said the employee who spent 30 minutes looking for the chairs in the back room. No problem, just take them back, I said.

"It's the same model," he blinked. "I'll have to wheel them all the way back into the store."

"Seriously?"

I led the way.

Yesterday, our phone system had a meltdown. So I drove over to Office Depot. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough handsets for the system that met our needs. No problem. I didn't have time to check other stores; OfficeMax is one block away. Beside, nowadays they have rubberband balls as the symbol of customer service.

OfficeMax had the same stocking issue. And since the employee didn't offer to check other stores, I found another system that was obviously in stock and still met our needs. All in all, a better customer experience. Except, that is, for one small thing.

After the transaction was complete and the phones were carefully double bagged, the employee asked me to wait. He walked over to another register, came back, mentioned a 14-day return policy, and then stamped my receipt in red ink. For any reason, he added, pointing down to the stamp.

"15% Restocking Fee On Any OPEN Technology."

It's another small thing, but I still have to wonder. Are these the last words you want to leave with a customer?

Establishing Reputation: A Holistic Approach To Business

Every year, Reputation Institute looks at how the general public rates 1,000 companies in over 20 industry categories in more than 25 countries, making Global Reputation Pulse the largest study of reputation in the world. Most of the work focuses on how companies perform in their home countries, but an article in Forbes today highlights 28 companies with international merit.

The Top Ten Brands By Reputation.

1. Google (United States)
2. Sony (Japan)
3. The Walt Disney Company (United States)
4. BMW (Germany)
5. Daimler (Germany)
6. Apple (United States)
7. Nokia (Finland)
8. IKEA (Sweden)
9. Volkswagen (Germany)
10. Intel (United States)

Microsoft just missed the top ten. And there are many great companies that round out the full list of the 28 most reputable companies. The study was based on several factors, including products and services, innovation, workplace, governance, citizenship, financial performance, and leadership.

Understanding What Reputation Really Means.

One of the most common mistakes in business is to use two terms — brand and reputation — interchangeably. (The same can be said for brand and identity.) The confusion has become more pronounced in recent years, in part, because some social media experts frequently combine identity, brand, and reputation. So let's dispel some of the mystery.

There isn't much reason to reinvent an answer in this case. Richard Ettenson and Jonathan Knowles clarified brand and reputation well enough in 2008.

They defined brand as a “customer-centric” concept that focuses on what a product, service, or company has promised to for its customers and what that commitment means to them. In short, it's the total net sum of all positive and negative impressions about a company based largely upon the consumer-company relationship.

Reputation, on the other hand, is a “company-centric” concept that focuses on the credibility and respect that an organization has among a broad set of constituencies. This would include everyone: employees, investors, regulators, journalists, local communities, and customers. And, it would include all those factors cited by the Reputation Institute.

If you need an example to help drive the difference home, Walmart is one of the best companies to consider. It frequently scores high as one of the best known brands, but its reputation often serves as its primary detractor. It will always be that way for Walmart until the company holds itself to a higher standard.

What It Takes To Establish A Strong Reputation.

1. Product/Service. The ability to deliver on a brand promise — products and services — is paramount to establishing legitimacy. It's one of the primary reasons Google sucked some of the air out of Yahoo as search stewards. As Yahoo bought companies and rebranded them to the central brand, it also inherited and transposed product and service issues. Sometimes it worked out okay with platforms like Flickr, but it suffered the opposite fate with platforms like MyBlogLog. Google, on the other hand, saw its reputation soar as it transformed its acquisitions into Google culture.

2. Brand & Identity. While reputation, brand, and identity are different, they work in tandem. While the products and services may have differentiation, the ability to communicate that differentiation makes all the difference. Apple is paticularly good at this by demonstrating its minimal design elements and innovation virtually with everything it does, right down to the people we expect to see behind the counters of any Apple retail outlet.

3. Advertising. While anyone can argue the finer points of whether social media has circumvented the traditional principles of advertising, it's still the primary source of message delivery. Advertising, more than any other discipline, communicates the brand promise, establishes the identity, and attracts enough attention to create sales opportunities. Sure, sometimes advertising drives sales, but mostly it focuses on everything else.

4. Public Relations. While some people might take exception to seeing public relations follow advertising, there is some truth to the idea. Public relations (and this includes but is not limited to the art of media relations) works to have other groups — ideally employees (via internal communication), investors, regulators, journalists, local communities, and customers — to adopt and believe in the brand promise. To do it, public relations professionals need to assist in creating an environment of mutual trust.

5. Corporate Citizenship. Great companies do not operate within a void. They generally consider corporate philanthropy part of their culture. Even small localized companies can learn from larger companies in that if the community isn't economically viable, healthy, vibrant, and provides a better quality of life, then it will wither. And with it, so will sales within that community.

When you add it all up and look to some of the best run companies in the world, you might sometimes come away with the feeling that those scoring highest on the reputation charts seems to have it all or, at least, very close to it. In some ways they do. But what's even more important to consider it that any company (or individual) can have it all too. It's a choice.

Finding Freshness: Fresh Content Project

Maybe it's because I've worked with this medium for so long, but some of my colleagues who are still learning social media basics tend to ask me for tips, tactics, and best practices so they can fake their way around the application. Sometimes I give them a few answers to address their most immediate needs. It's hard not to as an instructor, and I sincerely want them to succeed whether we're working together or not.

However, I have to confess I'm not always fond of the questions. Almost all of the them have to do with attracting more attention. They long for eyeballs and are willing to take shortcuts with lower price points to do it. I'm not surprised. If they made an investment, they'd know most of the answers to their questions already exist. If it is not among the thousand plus posts I've penned here over the last five years, then certainly among the hundreds of communicators I skim for fresh content daily.

Here are five more answers to such questions, and almost none of them have to do with attracting eyeballs. You see, when you know what you're doing with social media and understand where it fits within the context of strategic communication, "finding eyeballs" becomes the least concern.

Best Fresh Content In Review, Week of May 10

• Clever Retailer Use Of Blogging
People often wonder how to attract more attention to their social media efforts. Adam Singer does a great job providing the easiest answer — do something. He doesn't mean "do something" as in find more friends on Facebook. He means do something offline and then write about it online. And the example he shares comes from a Chicago retailer, who takes pictures of people taking pictures of his dog.

• Five Reasons Why This Blog Is A Failure
Julien Smith, coauthor of Trust Agents with Chris Brogan, tells Mitch Joel why Six Pixels of Separation isn't as popular as Brogan's blog. Among the reasons? Smith says Joel peers too far into the future, isn't controversial enough, writes too much content, and fails to connect to the everyday person. Not surprisingly, those are all the reasons we read Joel's blog. Ho hum. Popularity is never an anectode for developing the right audience.

• The Slow Decline of Social Media and the Rise of Common Sense
Kyle Flaherty wasn't really calling the for the death of social media. What he was recognizing was that all advents in communication eventually lose some the enthusiastic charm and become part of the overall plan. There's nothing wrong with that. In the effort to make social media a "more respected function of business," we need to sacrifice the "set of caricatures trying a little too hard to defend the practice."

• The Myth Of The Viral Video
When Arik Hanson takes a hard look at viral videos, he takes a very hard look at them. Sure, nobody can resist feeling good after capturing tens of thousands or millions of eyeballs, but then what? Do companies that rack up millions of hits for producing catchy content truly capture as many customers? Probably not. There is certainly a sweet spot, somewhere in the middle, where you can be true to your brand and still resonate with key audiences.

• Facebook's About Face On Conversation
There are scores of posts on the subject of Facebook, but Valeria Maltoni did the best job at succinctly capturing the essence of the developing story. Facebook is steadily building a corporate culture of unconcern in regard to how it treats its customers. Right now, it might work well enough because Facebook has captured enough mass to "feel" like it is the market. However (although not mentioned in Maltoni's post), we seem to remember another company that was once so big it could call all the shots and abuse members. That company was America Online.

Exploring Leadership: How To Re-Energize Teams

Despite everyone hoping the economy will overcome five economic fault lines, the task of recovery will ultimately fall to the leadership of individual companies and nonprofits. The deciding factor for many organizations will be whether they will re-energize their teams or demoralize them.

Generally, immediately after an organization faces an extended period of uncertainty or adversity, team members are likely to exhibit some fatigue. It makes sense. It's not all that different from running a marathon, where a struggling runner works harder and harder to either retain their position or even advance one or two positions around the final lap.

When the race ends, marathon runners tend to take a breath, place their hands on their hips or head, and walk off some of the stress. Imagine your team members much like that. It's natural. The last thing they want to think about is the next marathon.

However, smart marathon runners and their coaches also know it isn't that simple. For example, in 2003, marathon runner Lisa Golaszewski discovered first hand that runners suffer from symptoms equivalent of postpartum depression. If the post-marathon plan was too big, she felt ill-prepared and overwhelmed. If the post-marathon plan was too lax, she felt drained of energy and inspiration.

Team members respond much in the same way. Recovery plans that are too big cause burnout. Recovery plans too small are a disincentive. And no plan whatsoever, well, that is a recipe for disaster.

Where Some Will Fail.

Over the next year, some organizations that seem like they've weathered the storm will fail to meet less visible challenges. The most likely candidates will be those with leadership that will present a plan too big for team members to immediately embrace or those who attempt to motivate with negativity but no plan.

The latter occurred at one organization were I once served. Immediately after recovering from a near financial collapse that had team members fighting for the organization's survival, leadership decided to send communication to guilt members into new action with an ultimatum. While the communication was meant to target members that leadership felt were underperforming, it only served to demoralized the entire team and earned early resignations from under and over performers alike.

What went wrong? It morphed what ought to have been an opportunity to re-energize on a win into a rehash of bitterness that they did not take action on during the crisis because they were too afraid such action would have consequences. In all my years of service, the incident ranks second among the worst leadership decisions ever made. I had advised against it.

"The last thing you want to do is force racing again if your body isn't ready," Jason Lehmkuhle, another marathon runner, said in the Runner's World article.

Where Some Will Win.

The companies mostly likely to win can easily be divided into two types. The first, my favorites, will be those that never ran a marathon during the recession. They consist of companies that decided the recession was optional.

Relatively rested, these companies are among the most likely to see continued growth built on a foundation of success established during the recession. In essence, they have been running shorter races that were stressful all along.

The second type of organization that will excel will be those firms that invested equal time into recovery as they had preparing for the worst. They already have a course of action, many of them are ready to capitalize on shorter term goals through a recovery process that will position their organizations in a positive place.

The general feeling among those organization is significantly different. They knew all along that surviving the economic crisis wasn't an "end goal," but rather an opportunity to reposition. As a result, their leadership likely has a series of short-term goals that will rebuild confidence as each one is reached in record time.

"A great benefit of planning ahead is that you're not setting yourself up for the idea that this marathon is the culminating event," Sonja Friend-Uhl, a running coach, said in the Runner's World article.

Leadership Sets The Direction.

For marathon runners, the best course of action is to provide a breath for recovery and then gradually add quality and volume so that you emerge injury-free, mentally fresh, and able to capitalize on the fitness you built during marathon training. For organizations, provide team members with a breath and then focus on short-term, less stressful goals that the team can rally around. Doing so can only energize everyone.

If there were under performers, give them an opportunity to excel in the renewed positive environment or address those concerns on an individual, private basis. The last thing you want are over performers throwing their hands up in disgust over another crisis created by people who ought to know better.

Producing Better Writers: Public Relations Or Advertising?

When Andrew Fowler followed my integrated communication post by asking whether advertising could replace public relations, it opened a related sub discussion worth some attention.

Does Advertising Or Public Relations Have Better Storytelling Skills?

Fowler set the stage by offering up that he thought "people in advertising are better at telling interesting stories." Ike Pigott was the first to question the idea, offering "[people in advertising] don’t have better storytelling skills, and are often much poorer writers. Often." And then David Meerman Scott added "brand journalism is a much better way to do what PR used to do so well."

There are plenty of other great comments too, folks like Jeremy Toeman, Brian Cross, Jerry Ketel, and others. I especially appreciated the comment by Bob Geller that tends to be closest to my view, which is that both are important but different.

When it comes to writing, or even creativity, we might as well be asking ourselves whether fiction writers are better than non-fiction writers or whether poets are better than journalists. They are difficult to compare because they tend to be different.

Some writers are good at one thing. Some writers are good at other things. And only a handful can dance in any medium.

However, with the exception of the handful, there are noticeable differences in education, experience, and skill sets. And so, as an instructor who also works within all disciplines, let's take an admittedly generalized look at some writers within the communication field.

Advertising. Copywriters (and some designers who think they can write) are generally creative in a divergent sort of way, well-skilled in short-format conversational writing, storytelling, and alliteration.

When the copy and content is good, these writers accomplish the impossible by convincing people to become aware of or even purchase a product even though those people know that is precisely what the writer is trying to do. How cool is that? Sometimes their work is even adopted into pop culture.

Of course, not many have heard of the Associated Press Stylebook. They're often certain they'll come up with something more interesting than any client might provide in an interview. And they tend to tune out long-format assignments.

Public Relations. Public relations writers, specifically those with a journalism background, are especially good at making the most boring content sound interesting. The best of them subscribe to the notion that there are no boring stories, just boring storytellers.

When they write someone else's story, they become as a passionate as the people they write about while writing within the tightest constraints, usually sacrificing their own style in favor of a publication, corporate voice, or audience. They can also find enough facts to bend almost anything in their direction.

Of course, ask most of them to write advertising collateral and they'll struggle with the space limitations. Many offer up cornball cliches and pages and pages of dribble so dry that it will lull you to sleep before you can get past the first paragraph. In some cases, you don't have to read further than that anyway. And, of course, public relations tends to be a safe haven for many who cannot write at all.

Social Media. Social media writers, if we call them that, stand out on their own. They can have conversations with anybody about anything and have done better than self-teach themselves in the art of delivering exactly what people want to hear.

It doesn't matter much whether they have a preference for video, social networks, or blogs. All that seems to matter is that they bring a passion to the table that sometimes eclipses the craft, attracting thousands of people for no other reason than to wonder what happens next. Clearly there is an advantage in sharing some things that traditional media have known forever as if it never existed before they arrived online.

If there is a downside, it might very well be the speed in which the content is delivered with typos and grammatical mistakes that must make their high school teachers and any college professors blush. One wonders what might happen if they didn't rely on tricks and tactics so much.

Journalists. Given journalists tend to become authors more than any other discipline, it's hard to refute their abilities as writers. Even those who turn in their press passes and migrate into public relations have better skill sets and an understanding that those editorial deadlines are very real to reporters.

One of the unique aspects of better journalists is their uncanny ability to find the right story, research it objectively, and keep it fresh enough for people to feel compelled to add it to their daily doses of elective reading. Sure, there are those who point out that 80 percent of the publications are filled with refreshed news releases, but most of us only read the remaining 20 percent anyway. You know which ones are written by solid journalists because the lead line took as long to write as the article.

Now, if only more would take the time to engage their audiences beyond serving up content. Sure, there is more engagement than a few years ago, but most still prefer to work in relative isolation, stopping just long enough to gather some facts. Otherwise, the entire process, especially those who practice it for years, can slowly kill off any creativity.

Integrated Communication Promises To Challenge All Of Them.

There seems to be little doubt that integrated communication has arrived. And with it, those writers mentioned above, along with several dozen others who specialize in niche disciplines or a specific medium, are challenged two-fold.

First, they have to admit that their brand of writing might not always be the best fit, especially when we conclude that the Internet is home to every medium not just "their" medium. Second, all of them need to make a better effort to understand writing skills beyond their core skill sets.

The bottom line? It seems simple enough to me. Most aren't nearly as good as they think they are. Even fewer will ever concede the point. And from my perspective, the best of the best tend to be those who don't think much of what they write because within a week, they're certain they could have written it better.