Category: Organization Development

A crisis communications success story

From late December 2010 to early January 2011, massive flooding occurred throughout Queensland, Australia. The crisis tested the mettle of first responders and government agencies alike, and also, as in most recent disasters, highlighted the importance and effectiveness of technology and social media in crisis management.

In an article for Social Media Today, Stephen Collins describes a prime example, the Queensland Police Service:

• QPS presence in social media (on Facebook) was signed off May 10 2010 at Deputy Commissioner level as a six month trial. As a early December 2010, prior to the floods, they had 6000 “Likes” on their Facebook page. They were delighted at this point and had no idea what was to come;

 

• the entire media team is responsible for social media and it is tightly integrated into other comms and public safety work;
• QPS has no formalised social media policy. It has become a case of just do it. The benefits are there to be realised. Kym noted specifically that as a part of QPS’ overall strategic communications that the social media component is the “easiest, fastest, most efficient way to get information to the people of Queensland as well as our media stakeholders.” She noted that elements of the traditional media have expressed a level of unhappiness that they are no longer the gatekeepers for information coming from QPS;
• social media “really provided a connection” to Queenslanders during the floods and now, on an ongoing basis as QPS has made real efforts to engage with their audience. The same material that goes out over social media goes out over more traditional channels such as radio and television;
• the dissemination of public safety information via social media is seen as having a direct correlation to saving lives. Clearance for information distribution is at the sworn officer level, as it is for discussions of such matters with the media and public generally. No additional clearance process is necessary. On the matter of officers using social media directly in the field, the matter is under consideration, but not ready for action;
• at 12 months into a serious effort on social media, QPS are “still new at this”;

 

• QPS media now has over 178,000 Likes on Facebook and has an active engagement with many of those people. Often, things are posted by the public on QPS’s Facebook page that they had not anticipated (examples were given such as family members of offenders and victims posting information or tributes). This does not stop them being posted. Little is ever removed unless it breaches the page code of conduct published there.

The QPS has not gained its massive following (and thus communication power) through marketing tricks or some type of voodoo, but by engaging the public at a personal level while continuing to deliver pertinent and timely information. It really is that simple. Give people a reason to come back and they will, in droves.

Kudos to the QPS for setting an example for fellow agencies, keep up the good work!

——————————-
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.]

Don’t play friendly with the bad guys

It doesn’t require a deep look to know that Khamis Gadhafi, son Muammar Gadhafi, is going to be involved in controversy, so what would drive a U.S. company to bring him on as a high-level intern? Greed perhaps, or just foolishness? Here’s the story, from a Yahoo article by Zachary Roth:

The internship, which lasted a month, was sponsored by AECOM, a Los Angeles-based global engineering and design company that has been working with the Libyan regime to modernize the country’s infrastructure. Khadis made stops in San Francisco, Colorado, Houston, Washington, and New York City, meeting with high-tech companies (including Google, Apple, and Intel), universities, and defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. While in the Big Apple, Khamis even took in the Broadway show “Mamma Mia.”

News of Khamis’s internship, which was approved by the State Department, was first reported by ABC News.

Since coming home, Khamis appears to have played a key role in helping his father’s regime in its violent campaign to quell the uprising. He has led the elite 32nd Reinforced Brigade, known at the Khamis Brigade, which reportedly has been involved in brutally suppressing rebel forces.

The old saying, “if you lie down with dogs, you end up with fleas” is still around for a reason. AECOM took Khamis on what was essentially a paid vacation throughout the US, in a move that looks very much like an exchange for contracts in Libya. While of course AECOM has issued the standard press release mea culpa, this half-hearted crisis management effort will do little towards repairing its reputation.

——————————-
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.]

Tweets are forever, think twice (or more!) before you post

Although the service is simple at it’s core, Twitter presents significant risk of crisis if not handled carefully. We’ve seen several recent examples of users inadvertently posting personal messages from corporate accounts, usually resulting in a quick apology (and, often, firing of the responsible party). While that mistake can be avoided by simply double checking a name, sometimes a message with no ill intent but spectacularly bad wording causes trouble. Social media expert Jay Baer calls these messages “Tone Deaf,” and describes them here in a quote from his Convince and Convert blog:

These types of Twitter mistakes are a bit more disconcerting, as you get into questions of appropriateness and poor listening. The Tone Deaf error occurs when the official company account (or personal account of a high-ranking officer) throws up an air ball of a tweet that is outside customary social and societal norms.

Of course the most famous recent example of Tone Deaf twitter self-destruction was Kenneth Cole’s ridiculous linkage of Egyptian freedom riots with his new Spring collection.

Another cringe-worthy one was @UnitedAirlines tweeting the lyrics to the theme song of Frasier after a customer tweeted “Thanks to @unitedairlines I can finally watch that Frasier episode I missed in 1994.” The company entirely missed the sarcasm and frustration of the customer, which is bewildering because she’d sent 5 angry tweets within one minute.

The Kenneth Cole tweet, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC” is probably the #1 example in terms of how incredibly tone deaf someone can be. That single post sparked a massive wave of resentment and anger against the retailer that spanned all types of media and cost a bundle of money, along with a large chunk of reputation.

——————————-
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.]

Bad communication spoils airline’s response

Southwest Airlines is in trouble following an incident that caused its entire fleet of Boeing 737s to be grounded for inspection, canceling hundreds and delaying literally thousands of flights. Compounding the issue is the terrible crisis management from Southwest, which has sparked negative commentaries like this one, from a Portfolio.com blog post by Joe Brancatelli, across the Web:

Remember Saturday when Southwest was mum on both its website and Twitter feed about its troubled operations? Late Sunday, it added insult to injury by finally posting a statement on its website. Southwest’s verbiage is brazen, self-serving baloney. (See it here.) Southwest claims it “is experiencing relatively few flight delays and cancellations.”

Needless to say, 300 cancellations represent about 10 percent of Southwest’s normal daily schedule. A 10 percent cancellation rate is not “relatively few.” It’s a catastrophe, since airlines rarely cancel more than 1 or 2 percent of their flights each day. And a thousand delays are not “relatively few,” either. That’s a third of the airline’s schedule.

Refusing to own up to obvious problems is a sure-fire way to worsen any crisis. There’s just no sense in it, the public can already see, and if they can’t then the media will happily ensure they do. Southwest is going to permanently lose customers as a result of not only the incident, but also its inept handling afterwards.

——————————-
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.]

Control your story online

As it stands today, crisis management is very much entwined with social media. Whether you like it or not, when trouble hits you’ve got to quickly meet your stakeholders in the places they frequent in order to maintain control of your story, and that means being ready. In an article for business2community.com, David Vap provided some solid tips for getting your organization in position to handle social crises:

1. Understand your organization. Review external communication processes, social capabilities, and corporate culture. This is where we recommend scenario planning. Key questions could include: how would we respond if a vocal customer complaint suddenly went viral? How would we respond to a brandjacking attack?
2. Create a new social mindset in your organization. The social shift calls for a mindset characterized by transparency, accountability, employee empowerment, and planned spontaneity. Technology is certainly a crucial component of dealing with crisis communication, but preparing processes and practices must come first.
3. Know your consumers. Listen to conversations unfolding on the social web about your brand, and respond/employ proactive social support. Also identify your customer advocates on the social web – they will be invaluable in the event of a crisis.
4. Form a social crisis team. A successful social strategy must cross the boundaries of department and hierarchy because consumers expect a seamless experience. Build a cross-functional team, including a social media manager, a product owner, and at least one executive sponsor. Draw up a social team charter to clarify roles and responsibilities and create an internal collaboration space for this team.
5. Roll out a social crisis communications plan. Develop a playbook with guidelines for the social crisis team. Define an escalation process for potential PR issues. Build feedback into every step so you can adapt. Your plan needs to think through three areas – process and culture (what / who needs to change), technologies and tools (what to use to get there), and key metrics (what to track).

I especially like this list because of step two, “create a new social mindset in your organization.” Far too many businesses create social media accounts and install fancy managing programs but neglect proper training and education, not only stifling possible gains but also creating the risk of improper use, which raises the chance of crisis even further.

——————————-
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.]

Bad move sends Food Network star scrambling for crisis management

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is heralded as a fine organization, and celebrities and athletes are more than happy to spend some time making dreams come true. Well, most of them are. Apparently Ina Garten, star of the Food Network’s “Barefoot Contessa” doesn’t have much care for the wishes of a dying child or her own reputation, because she has twice denied the request of one boy and now the press has gotten ahold of the story. A quote, from PR Daily:

The boy, whose name is Enzo, suffers with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and he wanted to meet the celebrity chef after watching her while he was sick in bed. But a rep for Garten said, “As much as [Garten] would like to, it’s absolutely impossible for her to grant every request she receives.”

Really? She has that many request from sick 6-year-olds?

The public outrage toward Garten was so intense—after Enzo’s mom wrote about in the family’s blog—that she finally relented, saying through a spokesperson:

 

 

“Ina became aware of Enzo’s story this weekend and will be calling him today. She looks forward to inviting him to spend some time with her at the Food Network studios.”

Regardless of her eventual acquiescence, no amount of backpedaling will remove the stain that the initial denial has put on Garten’s reputation. The only guaranteed way to improve her image now is to publicly display her willingness to help others through unforced volunteer or charity work.

——————————-
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.]

There are two new large scale study reports on Nonprofits and technology just released in March 2011 that have quite a bit of noteworthy information in them. I am again writing two companion pieces on this topic:

This article discusses The Third Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report published by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and Blackbaud You can read my report on The Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index™ Study here. Both of these reports pull from organizations that have a relationship with Convio, Blackbaud or NTEN and they already have some meaningful technology involvement. So the highlights of the reports that I include don’t include percentages like “percent of nonprofits on Facebook” because in this regard it is a skewed sample. When you get past that, there is a lot to learn from these statistics about organizations who have already gotten their feet wet using social networks such as Facebook and YouTube.

Here are highlights – along with my commentary – from the Social Network Benchmark Report:

Facebook is by far the most popular social network tool being used by nonprofits and continues to grow. The number of fans on Facebook is growing as nonprofits focus more attention on it, but it is not a good source of fundraising. There is a considerable difference between creating a “casual” presence on Facebook and growing a viable program with a connection to a large audience and scalable results. This shows up in the statistical correlations between size of the community and staff and budget dedicated to it.

Participation in Twitter and LinkedIn is lower and has leveled off.

YouTube continues to be popular. I noticed at the NTEN national technology conference held this month in Washington, DC that there was a great interest among small nonprofits in YouTube and the whole Google for Nonprofits line. Google sponsored a long workshop and had a well manned booth for the entire conference and YouTube was definitely on the minds of the many visitors to check it all out.

Small new donor-empowered peer-to-peer giving sites CrowdRise, FirstGiving, Razoo and Causes all made a very small appearance in the study but they are on the map and worth watching. Who know who may take off and be the best new thing.

I am always asked about what is the right amount of staff time to budget for social networking and this report provided the clearest answer I have ever seen about what organizations with established social networks do. Over 60% of respondents say they allocate ¼ of a full time staff equivalent to it. Amazingly almost half the respondents allocate no – that’s right – zero, nothing, nada – budget for it. I can’t imagine any other activity that an organization was willing to dedicate 25% of an employee’s time without any supporting budget. It seems to me that unless you have a tech savvy, communications savvy, super dedicated overall dynamo on this you really should have some budget.

How about fundraising? 98% – that’s right again – do not use a social network for fundraising (52%) or have raised under $10,000 with it (48%). This was no surprise to me but it would be to the people who come to my social networking for nonprofits workshop who have fundraising in mind as a top goal.

It is always good to have information to benchmark ourselves against. Here are some important takeaways I have from this report. Whether large or small, many nonprofits are using social networking as an important tool today. They are using it for marketing and building relationships with their communities. They are also making strides in using social networking for education, advocacy, and program delivery.

If you haven’t been using social networks, or you haven’t done so effectively, it may be time to invest – time and money – to get up and running. Social networking has become a good investment for those making a reasonable effort.

——————

For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

——————

Guest post from Quin Harris

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an approach that organizations use to improve their internal processes and increase customer satisfaction. When it is properly implemented, this style of management can lead to decreased costs related to corrective or preventative maintenance, better overall performance, and an increased number of happy and loyal customers.

However, TQM is not something that happens overnight. While there are a number of software solutions that will help organizations quickly start to implement a quality management system, there are some underlying philosophies that the company must integrate throughout every department of the company and at every level of management. Whatever other resources you use, you should adopt these seven important principles of Total Quality Management as a foundation for all your activities.

1. Quality can and must be managed

Many companies have wallowed in a repetitive cycle of chaos and customer complaints. They believe that their operations are simply too large to effectively manage the level of quality. The first step in the TQM process, then, is to realize there is a problem and that it can be controlled.

2. Processes, not people, are the problem

If your process is causing problems, it won’t matter how many times you hire new employees or how many training sessions you put them through. Correct the process and then train your people on these new procedures.

3. Don’t treat symptoms, look for the cure

If you just patch over the underlying problems in the process, you will never be able to fully reach your potential. If, for example, your shipping department is falling behind, you may find that it is because of holdups in manufacturing. Go for the source to correct the problem.

4. Every employee is responsible for quality

Everyone in the company, from the workers on the line to the upper management, must realize that they have an important part to play in ensuring high levels of quality in their products and services. Everyone has a customer to delight, and they must all step up and take responsibility for them.

5. Quality must be measurable

A quality management system is only effective when you can quantify the results. You need to see how the process is implemented and if it is having the desired effect. This will help you set your goals for the future and ensure that every department is working toward the same result.

6. Quality improvements must be continuous

Total Quality Management is not something that can be done once and then forgotten. It’s not a management “phase” that will end after a problem has been corrected. Real improvements must occur frequently and continually in order to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

7. Quality is a long-term investment

Quality management is not a quick fix. You can purchase QMS software that will help you get things started, but you should understand that real results won’t occur immediately. TQM is a long-term investment, and it is designed to help you find long-term success.

Before you start looking for any kind of quality management software, it is important to make sure you are capable of implementing these fundamental principles throughout the company. This kind of management style can be a huge culture change in some companies, and sometimes the shift can come with some growing pains, but if you build on a foundation of quality principles, you will be equipped to make this change and start working toward real long-term success.

——————————-
For more resources, see our Library topic Quality Management.
——————————-

Virginia Tech has just been handed a $55,000 fine for failing to notify students in a “timely manner” following the shooting incident of April 16, 2007. That morning, two students were found murdered in a residence hall, but no notification went out for over an hour, leaving thousands of students vulnerable to another attack, which happened shortly after as 23 year old Cho Seung-Hui began another rampage, killing 30 more people. The school is appealing this decision, and made these statements, quoted from a CNN article:

Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, said Tuesday the school “respectfully disagrees” with the fine.

“As we noted before, neither the Department of Education nor the Clery Act defines ‘timely,’ ” Hincker said in a prepared statement. “The university actions on April 16 were well within the standards and practices in effect at that time.”

And,

University officials disputed the federal findings.

“We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them,” Hincker said.

Regardless of who is technically right, Virginia Tech is now taking additional reputation damage as a result of the four-year old case resurfacing and, should it continue to respond in a cold and impersonal manner, will suffer even more. It is possible to claim innocence while still showing remorse and humility, something that the statements from university officials are sorely lacking.

——————————-
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.]