PR 101

Anticipating how to handle a crisis before it occurs should be a key part of any company’s business plan. The one thing social media has probably made more difficult is crisis communications. A company now usually has minutes, possibly no more than an hour, to prevent a small crisis from growing into a major disaster. A response has to be immediate – within those same minutes of the crisis.

There is no alternative, no other option.

Here in my city of Milwaukee is an example of what happens when the crisis is more nimble than the responders. A suburban mall found itself the victim of what was apparently a flash mob that wreaked havoc throughout the shopping center. Then mall management made things worse by the way it responded

Businesses need planning and practice to be ready for a practice. A business has to have a crisis communications plan in place long before the crisis happens. To ensure the plan works when needed, it has to be rehearsed constantly.

Think about it. Fire Departments, police departments, the military and a host of other agencies constantly train. They do it so when they have to go into action everyone knows what to do.

Here’s what happened to Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, WI. I should note that it is one of the top shopping destinations in the Milwaukee metro area and is almost always crowded. In this case, I think the flash mob organizers decided that the crowd of shoppers would be the perfect audience for their “performance.”

For those who have not heard the term flash mob, Wikipedia defines it as a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.”

At Mayfair a group of several dozen teenagers raced through the mall, knocking over displays, running up and down escalators, which scared customers and staff. Mall management said the event was too organized to have been a spontaneous occurrence. They suspect it was organized via Facebook, Twitter or any number of other sites. Adding to the commotion was an apparent attempted robbery in the mall parking lot. Authorities have not said if the robbery was related to the flash mob but a shot was fired, which caused even more panic among. Luckily no one was hurt.

Mall management said they monitor social media sites to ensure things like this don’t happen. They said they were able to stop a flash mob planned for two days before Christmas. In that one, a group of high school students was planning on dancing in the mall.

If mall management is monitoring social media, someone fell asleep at the switch on the disruptive flash mob. For something this large, there had to be multiple posts on Twitter and Facebook. That’s how the word gets spread, by constant repetition across the web. Someone should have caught this.

It is possible the word was spread via text message. Unless you work for the National Security Agency, or some other federal investigative agency concerned with terrorism, those messages cannot be tracked. In that case mall management would not have had advance warning.

Even if Mayfair management did not have advance warning, the ball was still dropped after the incident. The flash mob happened Jan. 2. Mall management waited until the afternoon of Jan. 3rd to respond which meant for 24 hours Mayfair Mall lost control of its brand. In social media years that’s a lifetime. The mall was being defined by the hundreds of comments most of them negative made on social media sites and to the local media

When Mall management finally did respond, they did it by issuing a press release. Kind of like using a carrier pigeon to get the message out. What management said was just as bad.

Most of the statement condemned the group who disrupted the mall. It wasn’t until almost the end of the statement that management said: “the safety and security of our guests are always our top priorities.  We will not tolerate any behavior that compromises that safety.  As a result of this incident, we anticipate that there will be operational changes as well as consequences for those involved.”

What the statement should have said was that security was being increased immediately and there would be an even stronger policy governing when teenagers could be in the mall. The mall later did announce that it was changing its policy regarding when teenagers would be allowed in the mall. But that happened after the initial flurry of reports on the incident, which didn’t have the effect it would have had if the mall had made the announcement on the same day as the incident.

Plus Mayfair competitor Bayshore Mall announced changes to its policy for teenager access at the same time. There have been no incidents at Bayshore so that mall looked proactive. Mayfair suffered by comparison.

In other words, management be nimble, management be quick, or the business is going to be burned by something a lot hotter than a candlestick.

Planning for crisis communications should be a key part of every company’s marketing planning. I have preached that to clients for years. It might seem obvious to many people, but the rise of social media has changed the response to a crisis from hours to sometimes minutes. People who don’t get that always amaze me.

I am not talking about a plant fire or an accident. There might be actually more time to respond to the media on one of those. Most people understand that the average executive doesn’t have time during the event to respond to questions. It is perfectly acceptable to say in such a case that the causes will be dealt with once the immediate crisis is over.

What I am talking about is an information crisis, which can often more damaging that a physical disaster. The fallout from a physical disaster can be mitigated. Unless it is dealt with right away, a consumer complaint or an even an unfounded can spread around the Internet is a matter of minutes.

Even though Mark Twain died 80 years before the rise of the Internet, he summed it up correctly when he said: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Actually, I think a lie can make it all the way around the world before truth gets out of bed.

Part of the problem is many companies still don’t pay attention. I am always amazed that any corporation will spend millions on advertising, but very little on reputation monitoring and management. To not keep track of company reputation is committing business suicide.

One of my firm rules of is that social media can kill you before you even know are bleeding. Someone needs to be watching 24/7. Remember that old saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” That was because the English had colonies on almost every continent. Well, the Internet has a much a wider reach than the Empire ever did.

Facebook alone has over 500 million followers. Twitter is somewhere north of 100 million. If someone posts on Facebook an error your company made, and it goes viral, you could wake up in the morning to find your reputation trashed.

Look at the companies that have run into trouble because of their Internet ignorance: Proctor & Gamble’s Motrin, Comcast, United Airlines, Kryptonite Bike Locks, L’Oreal, Dell Computers, Wal-Mart, Jet Blue – the list goes on and on. (My thanks to SMI for its short history of social media screw-ups.)

Some of those companies learned their lesson and started paying attention to what as happening on the ‘Net. I am not sure others get it even after being punched around.

The only way to deal with is to be proactive. As I have also always preached, you have to be part of the conversation about your brand. It is essential. That’s why I always tell clients that they need to hear the bad comments more than the good. Good comments reinforce what you are already doing. It is valuable to know that so you can expand whatever worked.

Bad comments will tell you where you are making mistakes. That’s more important. Responding to a consumer complaint can build good will. Personally I find I like a place that is willing to own up to a mistake. It shows me they care.

Plus by doing that, a crisis is usually headed-off. If a company doesn’t respond to customer concerns and complaints, the whole thing can grow and get really ugly.

The take away from this is pay attention all time or be willing to pay the cost when you don’t.

I am a huge sports fan – baseball, football, soccer and bicycle racing in particular. Like most fans, I live to see moments that will go down sports history – Lance Armstrong’s record seventh Tour de France win, Red Sox Bill Buckner booting an easy ground ball, The Immaculate Reception by a Pittsburgh Steeler’s receiver and a lot of other things. I consider myself extremely lucky that I get to see such historic moments.

I am not so happy to see the records BP is now setting in the Gulf of Mexico. We have seen a whole of series of dubious achievements since the explosion April 21^st explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Since I am public relations and social media person, I am going to focus on one area in particular. British Petroleum has perhaps done the worst job of crisis communications in the modern history of public relations. I cannot think of another incident that has been handled worse than the Gulf oil spill.

This should be a lesson to every company. A disaster can happen anywhere, anytime for any reason. It takes about five minutes to destroy a reputation and turn the public against you if it is not handled correctly.

“BP is going to be first and foremost in people’s minds when it comes to poor crisis planning and response,” said Timothy Sellnow, communication professor at University of Kentucky and author of several books on public relations in a crisis told the New York Times. “They’ve surpassed Exxon.”

You know that old saw that goes if you locked 100 monkeys in a room with laptops eventually one of them would come up with Macbeth. Well, I think one monkey could come up with a better way to handle BP’s crisis communications that the company’s leaders.

To talk about all of the public relations things BP has done wrong during this crisis would take more space than I allocate for this blog. Let me put it this way – I cannot think of one thing BP has done right since the explosion. Every time a BP executive or spokesperson opens their mouth they make things worse.

The New York Times reported that Public relations experts say it appears both BP failed to follow the first rule of crisis communications: having a plan in place to deal with a potential disaster, .

“BP never had a plan in place for the worst-case scenario or they would have put it in place,” Kathleen Fearn-Banks, communications professor at University of Washington and author of the book “Crisis Communication, A Casebook Approach” told the Times. “I don’t think it’s a question of money. … They absolutely don’t know what to do at all.”

This should be a lesson to every company whether it has five or 50,000 employees. I constantly hammer on this with clients. A company needs to have a crisis communications plan. It needs to update the plan to reflect changing environments.

Most importantly, it needs to rehearse the plan constantly. Part of that rehearsal means media training the company’s primary spokesman. BP CEO Tony Hayward is a classic example of what happens when that doesn’t happen. If I had been BP’s spokesman when Hayward said he “wanted his life back” I would have resigned on the spot.

Hayward suddenly became the poster child for every out-of-touch CEO on the planet. Whether he meant it or not, he told the people of the Gulf Coast that he was more important than they were. In one five second sound bite, he destroyed any goodwill the company had. Any good leader knows his needs always come last.

BP has done a host of other things wrong, such as trying to ban the media from public areas; not accepting help from the fishermen who know the area best; and making promises they just cannot keep.

It is amazing to me just how inept this multi-national company has been. Let that be an example to every company. Be prepared or you will go down the same road BP is traveling on.