Crisis Communications: Don’t shift the blame!

Thanks to the good folks over at the Consumerist for providing an excellent example of how not to respond to a crisis.

During the recent flooding in Johnson City, NY, the folks at PETCO were taken unawares by the rising flood waters and lost 100 animals. The staff did manage to save an equal number, however. In responding to public outrage over the loss, a PETCO VP blamed a miscommunication on the part of the city, claiming to have never received the evacuation order. Bad move. Knowing your risk is part of good business and floods shouldn't be a surprise.

The blog posting was quickly replaced by one from the CEO stating that the company had misjudged the risk and took full responsibility for it's failure.

So what can we learn from this?

1. Don't try to shift the blame. People are not stupid and they will see such actions for what they are – an attempt to evade responsibility.Take responsibility up front and tell people how you will prevent a recurrence.
2. Don't lead with your most senior person in crisis - use someone in direct authority over the crisis. If your initial message goes south, your CEO or key official can step in and give you a second chance.
3. Be proactive. When the National Weather Service and the local authorities are warning about flooding, a bit of investigation is in order to determine your risk. It's a lot easier to evacuate as a precaution than to explain why you didn't.

TSA does it right on occasion

Regular readers of my blog know that I'm sometimes a bit hard on our friends at TSA or at least the managers responsible for some really dumb decisions. However, one of the things that you can do to overcome a negative image is to educate the public on what you do well.

In today's TSA blog, "Blogger Blog" offers the statistic that TSA has found 725 firearms in carry-on luggage since January of this year. He also points to a "Good Catch" pagethat highlights some of the more unusual items TSA inspectors have found and makes for interesting reading.

I would have liked a bit more detail to verify the claim. The implication is that most of these incidents were the result of passengers forgetting they had the firearm. But they could just as easily have been dry runs to test the system, so a bit more information on the cases would have been useful as well.

Still, Keeping over 700 handguns out of aircrafts is pretty impressive and it's a good move by TSA to share their accomplishments.

Emergency Management: Measuring ROI

How do you measure the effectiveness of an emergency management program? More specifically, how do you show that the money you invest in preparedness has been well-spent? Traditionally, we have used quantitative measures because "things" are easy to measure. So we count "things" like the number of plans written, the number of exercises held, the number of brochures distributed and the number of hits on a website. But none of this really tells us if we're making a difference. Is there a better way? The International Association of Emergency Managers thinks there is.

IAEM has recently released Preparedness: A Principled Approach to Return on Investment for comment. The work is an attempt to apply the Principles of Emergency Management to performance measures for the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) and allow us to base our assessments on relevance rather than just numbers. My colleague and good friend, Randy Duncan, Chair of the IAEM-USA Government Committee, recently gave an excellent presenation on the new framework on EM Forum. You can find a transcript of it on the EM Forum website along with links to the slides, video and podcast of the presentation.

Listen to Randy's session, read the document and send your commentsinto IAEM by September 15. This is a major step forward for our profession and the more input we receive, the better the end result. It's an opportunity to develop measurements that are meaningful to us rather than letting them be dictated to us by legislators.

And by the way, if you're not already on the mailing list for EM Forum, you should be. The programs are highly relevant and presented by some of the top people in our profession. Best of all, it's free! Sign up today and don't forget to check out the library of previous programs.

Social media and the 1st Amendment

There's an interesting debate going on here in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency has been dealing with a lot of fallout since an officer involved shooting a few weeks ago, including one major disruption by protesters that I blogged about on July 12. In anticipation of another major protest last week, BART temporarily turned off cell phone service in some of it's terminals. No demonstration took place. In contrast, BART left the service in place yesterday and ended up closing four terminals because of demonstrators.

BART is taking considerable heat from the public, the ACLU, and the FCC for potentially violating the First Amendment by restricting free speech. It has been suggested that the demonstration yesterday was larger and more disruptive because of BART's actions last Thursday. The demonstration yesterday was allegedly instigated by Anonymous, a hacker group that hacked a contracted customer service site over the weekend and posted personal BART customer information on the web in retaliation for BART's decision to shut down cell service.

BART owns the cellular service in its terminals and believes that public safety concerns should outweigh a brief inconvenience to its riders. The agency maintains that the ability to shut down service in stations targeted for demonstrations is a valuable tool that can help diffuse risks to passengers. 

This will be an interesting debate that will have a major impact on how we view social media. BART is a special government agency created by the State of California and we are right to be leery of any government restrictions on communications or the right to assembly. But does the use of cell phones and social media to organize protests rise to the level of a right? Is the right to free speech tied to the medium or the message? Is the use of social media by violent anarchists the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater?

These are not easy questions. On the one hand, BART's reasons for the restriction seem to be in the public's best interest. However, case law permits demonstrations on railway platforms, so BART's action affects the organization of a protest – it cannot prevent the protest. We're already seeing attempts to curtail social media as an organizing tool in other countries both during the "Arab Spring" and more recently in England. In this context, I think that a debate on how far we go in restricting communications in the interest of public safety is both healthy and essential. 

Social media and recovery: the London riots

My friend Regina Phelps just posted a fascinating article on how Twitter and Facebook are being used to organize the post-riot cleanup in London. At this writing the page @Riotcleanup has over 87,000 followers exchanging information about the cleanup and trying to match resources to needs.  A Facebook page exchanging information on the riot has over 19,000 likes.

There's also a webpage that assists in organizing the cleanup via Twitter – the website shows a map of cleanup locations and corresponding Twitter feeds or allows viewers to add their own cleanup location.

What is extremely impressive is that this is all organized by the community, not the official emergency services. Even more interesting is that these are not the only social media sites for this subject – this is not a case of one or two people leading and others following. Rather, it is a community responding collectively to a crisis. We're seeing similar things happening in Christchurch and in Japan.

Despite years of research to the contrary one of the most persistent myths in emergency planning is that people must be led and are incapable of acting in their own best interests. Social media is finally providing the community with the means to finally put this myth to rest.

Social Media: Waiting for approval can cost you

In a recent discussion, one of my colleagues stated that he had canceled all of his personal social media accounts after recent hacking attacks on Fox news. He felt it just wasn't safe. What concerned me, though, was the following comment he made:

"Before we put any advice out there on Social Media or on (a Federal government website), it has to be reviewed by our PIO and, in some cases our General Counsel."

Is this the policy within your organization? If so, you still haven't got it and maybe you should close your accounts.

The old paradigm of running all information through a single approval authority is simply too slow in the digital age. If you don't get your message out there quickly in a crisis, someone else will fill the gap and you may not like what they're saying. If you wait hours before countering bad information because you "need approval" you're dead – you'll never be able to recover.

It's not easy to change how we do business. Probably the biggest change is that we have to have a unified message with multiple sources of message delivery. What does this mean? It means stop blocking your employees' access to social media and stop having only one spokesperson who has to get approval before using the "official" site. Instead, establish a social media policy and educate your employees on your message. And, yes, this means you're going to have to trust them to represent you.

Public Relations: Don’t blow your apology with qualifiers

As someone who blogs regularly on crisis communications issues, I'm very grateful for the TSA. They provide a never-ending stream of case studies on how not to communicate with the public. Case in point – a young lady recently managed to inadvertently get a 3-inch knife past  two separate TSA checkpoints.Given the number of screenings that TSA deals with each day it's understandable that mistakes like this will happen. How you respond to them makes all the difference in losing or gaining public respect.

TSA responded to the incident by stating, "We continue to take the discovery of knives and other prohibited items seriously, however, intoday's post-9/11 security environment, intelligence tells us our officers' greatest focus needs to be on the biggest threat to aviation security today-explosives and explosive components."

Think about the message they are sending here: "it's not important that we missed a lethal weapon at two checkpoints because explosives are our real concern." What TSA is trying to say is true – explosives do pose a greater risk than knives. But the issue was a failure to detect a weapon at two separate locations – explosives didn't enter into it. What the public wanted was reassurance that they were safe, not a lesson in priorities.

Anytime your explanation includes a qualifier such as "but" or "however", you're on weak ground. It sounds like you're covering up a bad mistake by minimizing the importance of the incident. A better approach would have been to just say, "We continue to take the discovery of knives and other prohibited items seriously. Clearly mistakes were made by our personnel. We will investigate this incident and do what we can to prevent it from happening again." People understand mistakes but they really despise arrogance.

But maybe I'm being too harsh on the poor TSA, they did manage to spot the two inches of bottled water carried by the person in line ahead of the young lady, after all.

Social Media: Coordinate your message

1. A text message is not exempt from the normal rules for crisis communications: don't just tell me what - tell me why, how it will affect me, and what I should do about it.
2. If you're going to use social media, monitor it and respond to queries. It's a conversation, not a newswire.
3. Your message should include links to more detailed information. You can't say it all in 144 characters and multiple messages don't cut it.
4. If you have more than one social media outlet, coordinate the release of information across all platforms.
5. Either provide updates or provide options for updates as the situation changes.

Public Relations Faux Pas: Yet another TSA lesson in crisis communications

By now you have probably heard about the Nigerian man who succeeded in boarding a Virgin America flight from New York to Los Angeles using an expired boarding pass in another person's name. According to news reports, the man was briefly detained by the FBI on landing and released. He was arrested several days later trying to board a Delta flight to Atlanta using the same method.

One could blog for several days on all the things that went wrong but I'm always more interested in how organizations respond to mistakes than in the mistake itself. In this case, TSA freely admits that "…TSA did not properly authenticate the passenger’s documentation." They further promise, "…disciplinary action is being considered for the security officers involved and all appropriate actions will be taken." 

Accepting responsibility for your mistake and promising corrective action is always a good crisis communication move. However, TSA then proceeds to blow it by trying to minimize the problem by saying, "…it’s important to note that this individual received the same thorough physical screening as other passengers, including being screened by advanced imaging technology…" In other words, "we screwed up but it didn't really matter."

One can certainly make the case that a layered security approach is designed to compensate for mistakes in any one part of the system. There is no doubt that the individual was identified by the flight crew and reported to the FBI. But this occured after he had boarded the aircraft in response to passenger complaints about his body odor.

TSA has a fairly well publicized record of failing its own tests and for letting knives, pistols and box cutters slip through the "thorough physical screening" provided by its officers. (They have, however, confiscated my empty 4 ounce aftershave bottle and numerous one inch Swiss Army knives I forgot to leave at home.) To say that this man posed no threat simply because he went through the same screening process as other passsengers is a bit disingenuous.

The lesson here? Acknowledge mistakes and promise corrective action by all means. But don't try to defend yourself in a crisis by underestimating people's intelligence and relying on a reputation that is disputed by your past actions.

RFP: Why It’s a Bad Idea

It's been a busy few weeks around here, as you may have guessed. Like many consultants I was doing the paper chase – submitting proposals for potential projects. I swore last year that I wouldn't do it again – the chance of winning versus the level of effort required just isn't worth it. But there I was doing it again at the request of a good friend. We came close – had an awesome team assembled and a reasonable 100 page proposal done in less than a week. Even made it to the orals. Then the client decided to pull the RFP.

As I was reminding myself of why I don't do RFPs I came across an article by Michael McLaughlin on Rain Today entitled Why You Should Ignore that RFP. McLaughlin points out that the process is flawed because most RFPs require that you accept that the client's diagnosis of their problem is correct. Without significant one-on-one contact, you really have no way of knowing if this true. The result is that "…the client receives a stack of mediocre proposals to solve an unconfirmed problem."

This has been my experience as well and was part of the reason our potential client was not happy with the proposals submitted by the finalists. In my proposals I always try to develop a statement of the problem and this is sometimes extremely difficult to do. What's more interesting is that a lot of the time the client can't articulate their problem or tell me how solving it would benefit their organization.

So may I suggest that those of you who are still seeking services through the RFP process consider other alternatives? At least read my article Stop Throwing Your Money Away: Eight Tips for Improving Your RFP. Meanwhile, I'm taping McLaughlin's article someplace where I can re-read it next time I'm tempted to respond to an RFP.