Author: Jonathan & Erik Bernstein

Widespread use opens new crisis communications possibilities

As a culture, we started becoming more aware of the power of social media during times of crisis, like when the Iran election in 2009 caused a furor, both on the ground and on Twitter. More recently, the Internet and social media played an important role in spreading news about the earthquake in Haiti and political revolution in Egypt.

But what about other kinds of natural disasters or crime? Can social media be used to good effect then?

In 2009, two girls trapped in a storm water drain used Facebook to ask for help rather than calling emergency services from their mobile phones. At the time, authorities were concerned about the girls’ seemingly counterintuitive action.

However, according to new research from the American Red Cross, the Congressional Management Foundation and other organizations, social media could stand to play a larger and more formal role in emergency response.

In fact, almost half the respondents in a recent survey said they would use social media in the event of a disaster to let relatives and friends know they were safe.

While the girls who chose to use Facebook rather than dial 911 may still be ahead of their time (or attention starved…), social media has been used successfully for crisis management around the globe, especially in areas with minimal infrastructure, for everything from disaster response and disease tracking to coordinating political upheavals, and is now being integrated into emergency response plans for many major U.S. cities.

Already, emergency responders are starting to use text messages as one form of communication in the event of disasters, sending information to local residents about locations to find aid, shelter, or evacuation routes, while the same residents can send their own texts or visit a social media site to request care.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Stakeholder trust can ease the impact of crises

We all know by now that prior reputation has a major impact on the reaction of the public to crises. It’s been proven that, given a similar crisis, popular and trusted organizations take less of an initial fall than their counterparts. Why is it like that, though? Steven Behm, associate U.S. director of crisis and issues management at Edelman, explains in this quote from a Media Bistro article:

Reputations are a perception-based measure of the general public’s belief in an entity’s commitment to do the right thing. In a crisis, reputation is the currency by which organizations either borrow or default on in order to afford an ongoing license to operate. In most cases, the public expectation of companies today is that the issue will be addressed head-on and that measures will be taken to ensure the crisis never happens again. That said, the opportunity gap to invest into a reputational bank of goodwill becomes exponentially more costly during and after a crisis if there isn’t a foundation of trust at the start.

There is no way to buy this “reputational bank of goodwill.” It takes effort, and the best way is to build a rapport with your customers through hard work, solid service and honest communication.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Tell the whole story, or suffer the consequences

There’s nothing the media loves to expose more than a cover-up. Any hint of things being less than kosher in the aftermath of a crisis will result in heightened scrutiny, and if there’s anything being hidden then someone out there will dig until it comes out. What should you do with those unsavory details, then? Brad Phillips, of Mr. Media Training, explains:

Get It All Out: It’s human to want to bury the bad parts of a story that haven’t yet gotten out. But trying to bury negative parts of the story often extends the crisis and makes it worse. Information usually gets out anyway, and the lack of forthrightness reinforces suspicions about your integrity. If you think something is likely to get out anyway – and it probably will – it’s better to get it out on your own terms instead

Getting it out on your own terms accomplishes two things. First, it gives you credibility in the eyes of your stakeholders, always important if you want your words to be taken seriously. Second, it helps to eliminate the information gap that is often filled by hurtful rumor and innuendo and instead replaces it with verified facts, meaning your reputation takes less damage and can be repaired more easily.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Leaders must step up during a crisis

Too often leaders are paralyzed during the crucial beginning stages of crises. When things start to heat up it’s important to keep control, or things can quickly get out of hand. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, leadership expert John Baldoni gave his advice for those tasked with steering their organization through troubled waters:

Take a moment to figure out what’s going on. An executive I know experienced a major disruption in service to his company. He was the person in charge and he told me that at the first response meeting everyone started talking at once. The chatter was nervous response — not constructive — so he delegated responsibilities and then called for a subsequent meeting in an hour’s time. This also helped to impose order on a chaotic situation.

Act promptly, not hurriedly. A leader must provide direction and respond to the situation in a timely fashion. But acting hurriedly only makes people nervous. You can act with deliberateness as well as speed. Or as legendary coach John Wooden advised, “Be quick but don’t hurry.”

Manage expectations. When trouble strikes, people want it to be over right now — but seldom is this kind of quick resolution possible. It falls to the leader in charge to address the size and scope of the crisis. You don’t want to alarm people, yet do not be afraid to speak to the magnitude of the situation. Winston Churchill was a master at summing up challenges but offering a response at the same time. As he famously said when taking office in 1940, “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory; victory at all costs; victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”

Demonstrate control. When things are happening quickly, no one may have control, but a leader can assume control. That is, you do not control the disaster — be it man-made or natural — but you can control the response. A leader puts himself into the action and brings the people and resources to bear. Think of Red Adair, who made a name for himself putting out oil fires that no one else could. A raging blaze may seem uncontrollable but Adair knew could control the way it was extinguished.

Keep loose. Not only does this apply to personal demeanor — a leader can never afford to lose composure — it applies to the leader’s ability to adapt rapidly. A hallmark of a crisis is its ability to change quickly; your first response may not be your final response. In these situations, a leader cannot be wedded to a single strategy. She must continue to take in new information, listen carefully and consult with the frontline experts who know what’s happening.

As you can see, successful crisis leadership is as much about behavior as it is actual business actions. If the person in charge is calm and controlled, that feeling trickles down through the ranks, boosting confidence and productivity. Combine that with solid planning and execution and you have a crisis management machine ready to roll.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Blogs provide a simple crisis communication solution

Dark sites, fully built web pages held offline until needed, are known as valuable crisis management tools because they grant you the ability to react almost immediately to negative incidents. Taking that a step further is the idea of basing your dark site on a blogging platform, which, as Phillipe Borremans describes in this quote from a Communication Magazine article, has several benefits:

While a “dark site” doesn’t necessarily need to be based on a blogging platform, it does hold a couple of very important advantages:

• A blog is content focused and can be managed by non-technical professionals – no need for the IT crew to update a webpage, the communicator can completely control the crisis site.
• Updates are written using a standard word processing interface with “what you see is what you get” features.
• A blogging platform makes the best use of RSS feeds in publishing mode, allowing for easy and automatic content syndication to other social media platforms like a Twitter channel or a Facebook page.
• A blog can contain text, but easily integrates video, audio, files or a combination of these.

After creating templates for potential crises, it takes only minutes to plug in the appropriate information and publish, creating an information distribution center. Also, many fully-featured blogs are also free to use, a major advantage for small organizations and a good selling point for winning over resistant execs.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Get engaged and get protected

As with many other aspects of crisis management, businesses are hesitant to invest in social media strategies because the returns are often difficult to quantify. Get caught up in a Web-based crisis, though, and you’ll be thanking your lucky stars for the protection. In a post on the SmartBlog social media blog, Rob Birgfield summed up tips given by several panelists at last year’s BlogWorld Expo, including this one regarding the value of being engaged in social media:

Return on Investment? How about Return on Avoiding Pain? While many companies are looking to measure return on investment by looking at improved sales, greater operational efficiencies, etc., we often ignore social media’s crisis management benefits until it’s too late. Dallas Lawrence reminded attendees to invest in social media for what he calls a “return on avoiding pain.” To stop a crisis in its tracks, you have to have a presence and an ear to the ground. Lawrence cited United Airlines as an example. In 2008, when an archived story announcing the airline was filing for bankruptcy got picked up by Bloomberg – the story took off, made its way around the blogosphere and sent the stock tumbling. In the traditional sense, United did nothing wrong. But if they were appropriately monitoring — and consequently addressing the misinformation, the airline could have averted what turned out to be a true disaster.

Having a presence in the social mediaverse is like insurance for your reputation. Unlike insurance, though, social media is useful during good times as well, be it for marketing, communication, or monitoring stakeholders and the competition, making it well worth the investment.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Often it takes nothing more than honesty to garner large shares of good will from stakeholders. Despite how vicious initial responses can be, people are surprisingly willing to forgive even major mistakes if they receive an apology and a simple explanation as to how the issue will be prevented in the future. In an interview for B to B Magazine, Jet Blue director of corporate communications Jenny Dervin explained how her organization has utilized this strategy with great success:

“The first was an ice storm that took place in 2007 in New York,” Dervin said. “Other airlines stopped flying, but JetBlue did not. We were only seven years old. Our operational decisions hadn’t yet caught up with our size, and we were caught with our pants down.”

Dervin said the company worked to fix that blot on its reputation with email notes of apology to every one of its customers, and it announced a customer bill of rights detailing compensation in the event of future problems.

“We got out in front and asked people to forgive us,” Dervin said. “It got to the point where reporters asked when we would stop apologizing. But it’s important to realize that customers want to hear an explanation only after you apologize.”

That early PR problem prompted JetBlue to become a devotee of social media to keep track of any issues that might be brewing. The company now maintains an early warning system that is Twitter-based. A full-time staff of 17 employees monitors all mentions of the company on the microblogging site. Top executives receive reports on the most prominent positive and negative comments each day.

The company’s embrace of social media paid off in February 2010, when it faced the prospect of another winter storm.

“This time we decided to pull operations and used social media through our official blog,” Dervin said. The company explained its situation and posted links to content explaining how weather was affecting aviation, which resulted in 250,000 impressions.

“You build good will during daily engagement with customers, and then cash it in when you need to,” Dervin said.

One thing many of these community-engagement stories have in common is the organization’s use of social media. Obviously smaller businesses don’t need a full time staff to monitor this arena, setting automated alerts and devoting a small amount of time daily will yield many opportunities to connect and communicate with stakeholders on a personal, yet public, basis.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Frequent and personable communication pays off for US State Department

With many businesses still struggling to understand and utilize social media to the fullest, nobody expects a government agency to be proficient. Surprisingly, the State Department is surpassing expectations by not only holding accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, but also maintaining an active and successful Twitter feed. An article by Matthew Lee, published in The Philidelphia Inquirer, provided some examples of recent State Department activity on Twitter:

In recent days, department spokesman P.J. Crowley has tweeted to knock down rumors, amplify U.S. policy positions, appeal for calm, and urge reforms in Haiti, Tunisia, and Lebanon.

Well before he addressed the State Department press corps on the return to Haiti of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and the possible return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Crowley took to Twitter to pronounce the U.S. position.

“We are surprised by the timing of Duvalier’s visit to Haiti,” he wrote last Monday. “It adds unpredictability at an uncertain time in Haiti’s election process.”

Late Thursday, Crowley commented on Aristide. “We do not doubt President Aristide’s desire to help the people of Haiti. But today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past.”

He has posted sharp responses to WikiLeaks and promoted the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Chicago by comparing it to Sunday’s NFC championship playoff game between Chicago and Green Bay. “Chicago copes with two blitzes: today the visit of the President of China, Hu Jintao, and then Sunday the Green Bay Packers,” he tweeted on Friday.

According to the article, Crowley has nearly 10,000 followers in addition to a network of re-Tweeters that stretches across more than 100 countries. Nothing to scoff at, to say the least, and the more Crowley continues to establish the Twitter as the ideal place to head for current information and updates, the more influence the department will have when faced with a crisis.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Get your story out first

As anyone who’s been involved in a crisis knows, bad news travels alarmingly fast. This has been compounded in recent years by the evolution of cell phones into mobile computers, creating the need for near-instant reactions to breaking crises. When the situation does arise, Crisis Management 101 dictates that you take control of the situation. How do you do this? Babble On Communications President Susan McLennan gave her advice in a recent article:

Be proactive. Break bad news yourself so you can ensure your side of the story is heard. Waiting for someone else to tell it means you will only be responding and not able to contextualize the issue in the most helpful way. Reach out to the media and make your website a destination by updating it with the information the media and the public want, including the bad news.

Making yourself the go-to for information in a crisis means that you can make sure your customers get all of the facts, not just the negatives, which is what other outlets will surely be focusing on. It also plays the important role of combating rumor and innuendo, the common foes that arise when there is a lack of communication from an organization in crisis. Nothing is guaranteed to stop negative attention in a crisis, but by being proactive you can help shift stakeholder’s perspectives towards the positive.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

How will you communicate in a crisis?

At around 7 a.m. Friday, Bank of America Corp. experienced a partial outage of its online banking service. The Charlotte, N.C., bank used Twitter to get the word out, but it did not announce the outage on its home page. Impacted consumers simply got an error message.

“It is helpful if the bank sees [social media] as a part of their other communication channels,” which should also include branches, call centers, the Web and mobile, said Stessa Cohen, research director for banking industry advisory services at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

“It is part of a holistic plan to deal with operational risk events,” she said.

Over Twitter, B of A broadcast this message: “Online Banking Outage: Bank of America is working to restore capability as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

This quote, from a Bank Investment Consultant magazine article, describes a crisis communications mistake that may have been spurred on by too much focus on new technologies. Announcing service problems over Twitter was undoubtedly a smart move, but there is no excuse for not posting an announcement on the main Bank of America Web portal as well. After users saw the tweet, the logical next step would be to check the company’s page for more info, and, although Twitter’s popularity is enormous, every business still has a large number of customers that do not make use of the service that must be catered to.

Whenever you’re trying to communicate, it pays to use all of the possible channels. That way, everyone gets the message.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]