PR 101

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.

So, after unplanned week off from blogging – more about that later – I sat at my keyboard trying to come up with a topic for this week’s blog. I realized I have a lot of items that wouldn’t make up an entire blog, but are still things I want to put out there. So, here are some of them.

Apple Inc.’s Marketing

Whether you are a Mac or a PC, you have to admire the way Apple markets itself.  The phrase I used to start the previous sentence is an example. Apple has become an iconic product. It’s marketing is transcending its market and becoming part of the general conversation. Which frankly is genius.

Of course Apple runs television advertisement for its products. However, those commercials are just one leg of the centipede that is Apple’s marketing plan. I cannot think of another company whose products go viral faster than Apple. They are word-of-mouth geniuses. You gotta admire that.

BP and The Oil Spill

That would make a great name for a punk band. In the real world, it has been an unmitigated disaster for British Petroleum on so many levels.

If you remember, last I blogged about the need for a crisis communication plan. That plan cannot sit on the shelf and gather dust. Just like every other part of crisis planning, a crisis communication plan has to be practiced. In that way, when the real thing happens, the communications team will know what to do.

I have to say that if BP did have a plan, it ain’t working. They have so ham handed about the way they dealt with the media. Their people actually got testy about what the company was doing. Bad idea. That just leads to more bad press.

The only way to act when there millions of oil that will potentially damage eco-systems from Louisiana to Florida and beyond is contrite.

Ford’s Advertising Campaign
Ford Motor Co. clearly gets it when it comes to telling the public about their products. Their current ads are the firs I have been in a long time that actually talk about their product’s attributes. That is a good way to get consumers interested.

If you watch television commercials for automobiles, you will notice that the ads rarely talk about what’s in the car. Most of the time, the commercials are trying to sell image. The one exception to that are truck commercials. The people who buy trucks want to know about horsepower and payload. They don’t care about image. They care about owning a tool that will get the job done.

Ford seems to have transferred that idea to car advertisements. The commercials for such things as the Ford Fusion or the Escape SUV talk about cargo space, gas mileage and horsepower. Those are thing I want to know about when I look at cars.

The Internet

I never realized how much I relied on the ability to use the Internet until part of it was taken away from me.

As I am sure you all noticed last week PR 101 was attacked by a virus. It was part of a larger attack on WordPress Blogs hosted by Go Daddy. I eventually had to take the blog down to protect all of you from getting infected. It took awhile, but the viruses were eventually flushed from the system. I have to give kudos to the Go Daddy customer support for helping me.

I also have to give a huge thank you to Joao Moraes of Sao Paulo, Brasil. Joao is the man who designed this blog and maintains it for me. It was he who helped me work my way through all of the issues a virus attack presents. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have a blog.

I also have to thank of all of you readers for sticking with me. I appreciate it. Thank you.

The news and blogosphere have been full of items lately on various crises – from Toyota to the Catholic Church – large organizations are struggling to deal with issues that threaten to swamp them. The sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. If organizations would use bit of common sense and foresight, the crises would either never occur or they wouldn’t grow into major issues.

So while you can consider this a rant, it is also a warning and a how-to. A rant about why organization and the people who run them don’t try to head off crises; don’t realize what will happen if there isn’t a crisis plan; and a how-to – perhaps avoid the problem.

There are three kinds of crises:

• Immediate crises: Most dreaded type. Happens quickly and unexpectedly. Little time for research and planning. Includes such things as earthquakes, fires, plane crashes, product tampering, workplace shootings, and death of a key officer
• Emerging crises: Allows more time for research and planning. May erupt after festering for long period. Includes such things as sexual harassment, substance abuse, overcharging on contracts. Key is to convince senior management to deal with the problem before it explodes.
• Sustained crises: Problems that smolder for long periods of time, despite best efforts to put out the fire. Rumors go viral, getting reported in the media, tweeted about, posted on Facebook, written about by bloggers and other social media sites. Examples include P & G being in league with Satan, that fluoridated water is dangerous or that some childhood vaccines lead to autism.

Obviously, there isn’t anyway to anticipate the sudden crisis. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a general plan – a framework – in place to deal with it and whatever happens. How many companies have you seen scramble in the first hours after a crisis happens? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Planning for a specific crisis is not possible. Planning on to handle crises is and should be done.

That’s why I am always amazed when I see a company like Toyota get in trouble. Here is one of the smartest marketers on the face of the planet. Yet, they create a crisis because they don’t listen to their customers’ complaints. Clearly they didn’t have a crisis communication plan in place. That’s just dumb. The list of companies that have done the same thing would fill two blogs.

What all those companies lacked was a scout, someone whose job it was to keep his or ear to the ground (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). If you keep any eye on what’s going on out there, you can avoid a lot of problems. The idea is to identify the grass fire and put it out before it becomes a forest fire.

Sometimes crises happen despite an organization’s best efforts. That’s when the plan comes in. Knowing what to do is half the battle.

Remember, as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”