Discovery Communications: Emergency Planning and Crisis Communications

The hostage taking incident last week at Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, MD, (less than 10 miles from the White House in Washington) has quickly faded from the news pages. Yet a couple of notes regarding new media and crisis planning and communications are worth making.

The hostage taker was shot and killed by Montgomery County (MD) law enforcement. And because no one else was physically injured, the news media packed it in and most of the coverage was over within a day of the event.

The good news was that Discovery had an emergency plan and followed it. The company used an internal public address system with the first alert, and then sent a series of emails to all employees at the headquarters location. The first email instructed employees to stay at their desks, quickly followed by a directive to find a locked office, the next told them to go to a specific stairwell and leave the building. Children in the on-site day care center were evacuated to a fast food location soon after the incident began.

After the incident was over, Discovery's spokesperson was appropriately effusive in his praise of law enforcement. He was almost as effusive in thanking all of the employees of the company in how they followed the evacuation and emergency plans.

Was the plan perfect? No. But it was pretty darn good since no employee or visitor was hurt. Yet, Discovery is now going back to review building access procedures. Email was used to communicate with employees; which assumes that almost all have access to a work station. A public address system gets word to all, but it might have also further enraged the hostage taker. Text messages, which many universities now use to alert students, can't reach all employees.

Another important reminder is that crisis and emergency plans need to be "drilled." Fire and rescue personnel know that their success in emergencies is dependent on the number of times they drill. Similarly, employees must participate in fire drills, know the correct procedures and know where the exits are.

As to social media, Twitter showed its role in communicating the breaking news. The first photo of the hostage taker was taken by an employee, who passed the photo to one or two other employees before it was posted to Twitpic. (Tweets can viewed http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23discovery.) The local DC news organizations rapidly sent teams to cover the events, and used their websites and twitter accounts to send frequent updates. Washington Post columnist Paul Farhi backhandedly gave Twitter its due http://tinyurl.com/2chclly then discussed the role of regular reporters and editors to collect the news.

I liked the discussion of the role of professionally trained news gathers and editors in taking breaking news and providing a lens and perspective on the events. "We can't let raw info go out over the air. The front end is new, but we still have to do our work at the back end" said a news editor from a DC television station. The Post column gave me a sense that Farhi was reluctantly assenting to the fact that that while Twitter might have its place in instant news, he preferred the "move over boys" professionals who came onto the scene. The reality is that photos, videos and soon streaming video will increasingly come from citizens and bloggers. This unfortunate incident was another example of how the rules are still evolving in the information dissemination age.

Mike Wise's Unwise Spoof

Just because the term "Social Media" contains the "M" word doesn’t mean professional journalists in the Mainstream Media always know how to use it properly.

Case in point: On Monday morning, popular Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise intentionally posted a fabricated tweet announcing that Pittsburgh Steelers' quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games, rather than the initial six game suspension he received after allegations of personal misconduct. (http://tinyurl.com/29tnu5k). This was a big deal in the world of sports news.

What turned out to be his misguided attempt to illustrate lower standards of fact-checking and basic journalism skills in social media violated the Post's own guidelines for social media, which requires that Post journalists will be accurate in their posts and transparent about their intentions.

It also violated the standards of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) which states that journalists are responsible for testing the accuracy of all sources of information and that deliberate distortion is never permissible (http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp). Whether or not Wise was aware of the standards, Wise went out on his own to post erroneous information. He never did post that his comments were a "spoof" until it was too late.

The Repercussions of Mike Wise’s false post:

• A 30-day suspension for Wise from the Washington Post and a hit on his own credibility. Some have speculated that he should have been fired.
• According to the Chicago Tribune, (http://tinyurl.com/2at9kuz) other media outlets picked up the story before Wise announced that the whole thing was fabricated, trusting that the Washington Post was a credible source.
• A black eye for the Post and for a mainstream media sector already reeling from lowered public trust. According to a Pew Research study, (http://people-press.org/report/543/) the press accuracy rating hit a two decade low in 2009. In 1985, 55 percent of Americans believed that news organizations were accurate in their reporting. As of 2009, only 29 percent feel that the organizations get their facts straight. If journalists are printing misinformation this number could continue to drop.

At CommCore we tell our clients that credibility and transparency in communications are two key building blocks necessary to create trust with your audiences. This is especially true when communicating in the world of social media where an absence of official professional fact-checking combines with instantaneous global proliferation of information, valid or not.

Twitter is not just a social media platform: it is increasingly perceived by the online and wireless public a breaking news headline service, and it needs to be used with extreme care by professional communicators, something Wise clearly forgot while trying to be too clever by half.

We don't go along with the crowd that he should be summarily fired. Anyone is entitled to a mistake. Hopefully, the lesson will be learned by others trying their own "hoax."

What rules, if any, does your organization have for on-the-job use of social media to disseminate information to the public? Do you have other examples of social media missteps?

THE BEST CRISIS: THE ONE YOU NEVER HEAR ABOUT

One of the best points in the recent NY Times article on BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs http://nyti.ms/9KT2ck was the statement that organizations that handle a crisis well are rarely heard about.

The famous question about the tree falling in the forest applies. Did it fall if no one heard of it? Or was the fall gentle enough that it made so little news or web noise that it was quickly off the media's watch list?

There are a few key factors that often determine if a crisis is a non-media event:

· having a crisis plan

· testing the crisis plan

· management that reacts quickly and follows the plan when an event occurs

· a concern for the organization's reputation

· maintaining strong and transparent ongoing relations with media, employees, customers and stakeholders

· almost always, a bit of luck

We'll explore each of these factors in the next few blogs. Let's start with developing the PR Crisis Plan. The point is that most organizations have up to date evacuation and operational plans; many fewer have PR or Reputation related plans. Or if they have plans, they don't update them with the latest improvements, such as adjustments for social media or adjustments when an organization goes into higher risk activities.

Notice the one word the gets repeated - plan. There is no substitute for planning and drilling because speed and accuracy of response are crucial to containing a crisis as close to a non-event as possible. We rely upon our local fire departments to plan and drill, plan and drill and plan and drill. Then if the fire strikes your house or office complex, the trained and experienced first responders work quickly and professionally to keep the damage to a minimum.

What goes into the crisis plan? First figure out the team. The team should help decide what types of emergencies or internal crises can become PR or Reputations crises. Who should be on the team? At the very least, representatives of senior management, finance, PR, IR (if public), risk management, legal, HR, IT and SME's (subject matter experts).

Once you have the team, then you can decide what types of crises you need to plan for and the difference between an Emergency and a "show stopping" crisis. Emergencies occur every day and we're trained to respond. These are usually the "tree didn't even budge" events.

In every type of business or organization, there are the usual crisis suspects - from operational issues and emergencies to reputation issues - all of which could attract media attention. After the general list, then you need to apply the Mirror Principle: hold up a mirror to your organization and see what might impact your operations. For example, a firm with a low profile CEO and no international operations, will have some similar and some very different potential crisis issues from a like company with a high profile CEO and far flung global operations. The development of a crisis plan combines rigorous auditing of the what if's and the development of step-by-step processes for crisis response.

The plan must also have a basic list of what steps to take in a crisis - often incorporated into a decision tree. All the steps should be in a single document or in a secure on-line file. But most modern plans get reduced to one or two wallet sized laminated pages or PDA files, with links to the plan stored on a server. Contact numbers and emails are table stakes for those on the team and the commitment to monitoring events and rapid response. Literally after that, it's all in the details.

NEW YORK TIMES ANALYSIS OF RECENT CORPORATE CRISES

A good analysis of BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs on crisis appears in the New York Times, Sunday, August 22. http://nyti.ms/9KT2ck. Peter Goodman’s article makes several strong points:

1. First, it's one of the better factual recounts of the events for each enterprise involved in the spill and the cleanup. BP et al are now buzz words, very few people actually know or remember what actually occurred.
2. Goodman does a good job describing the tensions between legal departments and PR. Lawyers are primarily concerned with litigation and proofs in court, and with shareholder actions. The PR teams, while aware of these issues, face the need to communicate with regulators, shareholders (not with their lawyers), customers and consumers.
3. He notes that for the lucky organizations that haven’t been in the public eye, start now and develop a crisis plan. This will save time and confusion during a crisis.
4. In the middle of the really big crisis, he writes, no organization is really "winning" particularly when all facts are not in and the regular and social media has the events in hits 24/7 gun sights.

We would have added a few more items to make it a fuller article:

1. Goodman barely mentions the role of social media and its impact on crisis planning and response. Perhaps he didn’t think it played much of a role in this year's biggest crises. Yet he should have found a couple of experts to talk about how social media is a game "impacter" in the current media landscape.
2. Besides Goodman's recommendation to start planning for crisis, we also recommend that companies think through what we at CommCore call the RPM "Reputation Protection Model ©" through the lens of how the company, agency, organization or brand is viewed at-large.
3. Goodman, like other reporters on crises, uses Tylenol as one of the comparisons to this year"s bumper crop. The point he misses is that in addition to making the right moves, Johnson & Johnson benefited in that they were never perceived by the public as the bad guy. In the cases of BP, Toyota, and Goldman Sachs, each of the companies did something to either start and/or make the crisis worse. J&J was essentially minding its business when the attackers placed poison in the bottle.

As we track crises, we have a perspective on the recent salmonella egg recall: http://www.commcoreconsulting.com/resources/observer.html

Tony Speaks

Former BP CEO Tony Hayward gave his first interview last week in the UK. (http://tinyurl.com/32hnzud) While the article included comments from critics, he wasn't as immediately challenged as his prior appearance in front of the US Congress or the lying-in-wait law suit depositions. Hayward - who has actually been well received by employees and others back home in the UK -- clearly realized that he was the symbol of everything that went wrong in the Gulf. "…I understand that people find it easier to vilify an individual more than a company." Hayward did concede that he was wrong when he said, " I'd like my life back….BP can rebuild faster in America without Tony Hayward as its CEO."

Critics in the article were less moved Hayward's personal comments vs. the actual damage in the Gulf. "Mr. Hayward should be less concerned about his vindication, and more concerned about what BP will do to end the victimization of families and business in the Gulf," added Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass).

In our experience, Hayward has a pretty good sense of what happened. It's much easier for media and regulators to either blame or give credit to an individual than a corporations or organization. Whether Hayward is right in his assertion that he was doing everything "right", we'll let history and the courts pass that judgment.

The other point is that all crises eventually hit their low point - when the bad news turns around. For BP, Hayward was continually getting vilified while there was still no firm date for when the oil leak was going to stop. Only in the last couple of weeks, with the success of the caps and eventual relief wells can BP begin reputation repair in earnest. According to some research, with the slowing of the spill and the replacement of Hayward, BP's public reputation has crawled back to slightly above Goldman Sachs.

The road back won't be a straight path of improvement in business and perception. There will be numerous ups and downs. The day of Hayward's interview, another report indicated that many BP gas station owners want BP to re-rebrand back to the Amoco name. Consider when ValuJet became AirTran after fatal plane crashes. http://tinyurl.com/2bg2t59

How do you think BP and Tony are doing? Do you care about Tony Hayward?

Mea Culpas and Apologies Can Be Too Little, Too Late

Thomas H. Graham, regional president of Washington, DC region utility Pepco, has had a rough few days trying to restore power since a mammoth summer storm caused hundreds of thousands of electric outages on July 25. Some outages have continued for most of the ensuing week.

This blackout comes six months after another series of extended outages last Winter during three unusually huge winter storms in the space of a couple of weeks. Graham has been all over the news, apologizing for everything from the inability to restore power to an error-prone electronic public alert and response system that failed miserably at crunch time. News outlets have been broadcasting unflattering power outage updates every few minutes for days, and reiterating the litany of mistakes by Pepco as it disseminated information that was wrong. http://bit.ly/aGdGco

A utility is not a corporation, and isn't accountable to customers and shareholders the same way a publicly-traded business is. And a natual event such as a violent storm is not the utility's responsibilitty. But proper and accurate response and risk management are because a utility delivers critical municipal services that people rely on all the time. If recent blogs and online news comments are any indication, an even bigger hurdle for Pepco than turning the power back on will be regaining the trust of customers who feel no sympathy at all, apology or not. Here's one of hundreds such comments:

"My neighborhood still does not have power. My frustration is not only with Pepco's failure to address long-standing issues such as burying power lines, but their incredibly poor, inaccurate and possibly dishonest response to customer service. I believe that significantly more households are without power than their on-line system shows as it does not reflect the reality in our neighborhood."

The only mitigating factoid that Graham and Pepco spokesmen have been able to get out that has resonated with the media is that the Washington, DC region has the third largest area in the country covered by trees after Atlanta, GA and Portland, OR. They also say they have brought in assistance from surrounding counties and states, and are working around-the-clock. Yet many callers to radio stations keep saying they have yet to see a utility truck.

Pepco isn’t ducking the torrent of criticism. Besides Graham’s me culpa, a Pepco spokesman posted the following item in a comment section in the Washington Post filled with blistering attacks against the utility: “I understand your frustrations. Our number one priority is to restore customers' power as quickly and safely as possible. Our crews have and will continue to work 24/7 until all customers' power is restored. Having said that, we also recognize that there was a malfunction in our ETR reporting system since Sunday. This glitch has been fixed and never affected the speed or efficiency of the power restoration efforts of our crews. I will continue posting updates as I receive them @PepcoConnect on Twitter. Best, Andre (Pepco Social Media Representative)”

At CommCore we tell our clients that accurate information and transparency are essential to effective crisis communications. We also tell them that apologizing for what happened in the past – if appropriate in the first place – will still only go so far. Yes, people want empathy. But what affected customers and stakeholders want to hear most in a crisis is first what you are DOING about the problem and when, and secondly what you WILL DO to try and prevent it from happening again. Moving the discussion to promises about future courses of action presents an opportunity to change public engagement from criticism looking backward, to collaborating on finding solutions going forward.

The new challenge, then, will be to deliver on those promises. For the moment, Pepco appears to be paying for the public’s perception that it failed to deliver on such promises in the past.

What communications lessons can you draw from Pepco’s predicament and response?

Responding to "Fake" Tweeters

Public companies increasingly have to deal with "fake" Twitter accounts created by people who have a bone to pick with the corporation or its brands. BPGlobalPR, for example, is a mock Twitter account using the BP name that has already acquired over 187,000 followers with its satirical spoof tweets on the company's oil spill clean-up efforts. See http://www.twitter.com/BPglobalpPR) and http://huff.to/aInX2y.

A typical posting reads "Attention young people! Sign up for a BP internship! (Must bring own industrial strength gloves. No pay. No snitchin'.") And: "Yes, we disabled the alarms on the Deepwater Horizon. Oh, like you've never hit the snooze button?"

By way of comparison, BP_America -- BP's official Twitter address -- has only 13,500 followers.

Due to the sheer size of the fake account, BP responded by requesting a disclaimer stating that it is an illegitimate account and does not reflect the views of BP. All they got was one tweet by the spoof site: "Not sure what we've done wrong, but we've been asked to change our name/profile to indicate that we're 'fake'." See: http://bit.ly/bQo9DT.

As of today the Twitter account name remains unchanged, with no disclaimer visible.

Clearly, no company is too big to ignore Twitter or other social media platforms these days. But it is important for companies in crisis to choose their social media battles wisely. In the event of a fake Twitter account, for example, we would suggest the following:

* Check out the number of followers of a particular muckraker who has it out for you.

* If it is not a substantial amount in relation to your company’s consumer base, then don’t lose
sleep over it, but do keep monitoring it in case the criticism and responses intensify.

* Try also to look at it through the eyes of the average consumer. Would they recognize this tweeter as a joke? Or is it a true threat to your company’s reputation?

* In the case of a mock account with a huge base of followers and a lot of activity such as re-tweets or @ references, it may be time to address them appropriately using the company's official account name. Another option would of course be to strike a deal and join forces with the mock account. They could use their satire to get their frustrations out, and the real company can throw their key message into the mix.

CommCore advises its clients that monitoring online and social media commentary about their company, brand and executives is an essential part of good PR and Crisis Management practices.

But companies need to use a resource like Twitter wisely, and to assess the real impact of online voices who may just be stirring up trouble to get a rise out of big business. Be careful not to react unnecessarily or angrily because that may just make you the bully picking on the little guy.

How would you react to a similar spoof site about your company, or your client’s company?