The 3 essential aspects of lasting enterprise reputation

September 10, 2012 by 1 Comment

In this new episode of our “Reputation Management Decision Makers” WebTV series, Michael Jaïs interviews Alain Cayzac, Senior Advisor for GOETZ bank, in a discussion focused on crisis and reputation management.

The two men being such passionate football supporters, conversation could only begin with news of the Paris Saint-Germain ;)

But, beyond purely sports-related topics, the top club is used as an example company throughout the discussion and the various elements of reputation analysis mentioned in the video are also applied to it.

Crisis management insights

And the former President of Paris Saint-Germain has plenty to explain when it comes to crisis management, a discipline all football clubs must learn to master efficiently :

  • First of all, always know the difference between mere incidents turned into crises artificially – to defuse them – and real crises the consequences of which are dire and difficult to manage both in human and professional terms
  • For the latter : always acknowledge rather than try to avoid, show the empathy and compassion in a situation that implies real suffering from the victims, take action and communicate it efficiently.

Reputation management insights

And to answer Reputation Management, Alain Cayzac dons his co-founder of EuroRSCG jacket to draw a parallel between a person (human being) and a company, a dynamic and evolving organisation, in order to apply to the corporate world practical rules inherited from the Personal Brand model and its virtuous trinity : Being, Character and Style.

I’ll let you discover for yourself the details of this theory and the real-life examples of enterprise reputation analyses (including that of Paris Saint-Germain! ;) ) in the video itself and invite you to apply the same reasoning to your own organisation.

Is your balance perfect ?

Filed under Augure News, Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , ,

10 ways media monitoring will help your crisis management

March 22, 2012 by 2 Comments

It used to be that a corporate crisis was triggered only by major events involving top executives, global scandal or industrial accidents. The media would relay the news at best on a daily rhythm and giving company spokespersons as much coverage as the news itself. The public would get daily updates from a limited number of sources, most often TV, maybe the morning radio and a newspaper. Coverage would be very similar, providing incremental information in a linear fashion as time went by. Only the amount of coverage in a given publication or program would determine how much of the story people got to read or watch.

Contrast this now with a classic social media outbreak such as the Domino’s Pizza or United Airline broken guitar videos. Created by amateurs – employees for Domino’s Pizza and a disgruntled customer for United Airlines – these received millions of views on YouTube in only a few days, spread from friend to friend every minute and got relayed by mainstream media, sometimes without the respective companies having their say.

Both videos triggered response from the highest levels of management in spite of the original incident being fairly minor : yes, the Domino’s Pizza video was disgusting but the gravity of the facts pale in comparison to what would have been necessary to generate as much noise only 10 years ago. And the United Airlines example – and its almost 12 MILLION views – highlights the possibility for the dissatisfaction of a single customer to find a great echo with the other members of the public when the heat would previously have been kept private.

Given that the probability of positively resolving a crisis decreases in time, with simultaneously increased crisis management costs, this greater propagation speed not only means more frequent crises but also more complex and costly resolutions. An efficient monitoring process and well rehearsed response plans are the best safeguards against this phenomenon.

Here are 10 ways media monitoring will help you avoid the worst before, during and after the crunch :

  1. Knowing you natural channels. The most effective crisis management device, bar none, is a favourable terrain. Surveys show, year after year, that a company with a good reputation will be much less affected by bad news than another with a low trust capital. Pretty obvious but not always acted upon. Cross-channel media-monitoring will tell you exactly who is talking about you and where discussions are taking place. Also what media and what channels are covering you.
    2. Coverage of a crisis by media type

    Twitter rules this crisis

  2. Closing the gaps. Conversely, by monitoring your competition and industry topics, you will also find who isn’t talking about you, but should be. This lets you start conversations and begin building trust in other important corners of online and social media.
  3. Understanding propagation. If, through your monitoring, you’ve been paying attention to what the information propagation patterns are in your industry, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who starts rumours, rants and misinformed discussions. And of who amplifies news, who defends your positions or corrects errors. Not only should this provide you with plenty of ideas for engagement before a crisis, it will also help you react much more efficiently when red alert is sounding.
  4. Understanding pain points. You might be surprised with the topic that ignites a crisis. There probably was no way for Domino’s to anticipate the coup-d’éclat of their employees but, in most cases, it’s pretty easy to understand what the main pain points are for your customers (or partners, or employees …) and prepare for disaster in that direction.
  5. Detecting a problem early. If my lengthy intro tells you anything, it’s that speed is an essential ingredient for success. Frequent feed updates will give you an early start and the ability to at least establish an official presence in the discussions very early on to correct mistakes or, at worst, simply say “I don’t know, but we’re looking into it”. In the example below, catching the opportunity to speak out on the 25th is a lot better than a few days later. Real-time is better still.

    6. A sudden spike in media coverages can indicate a crisis

  6. Fostering engagement. In the first phases of a crisis, it is important to understand where the threat is strongest. The most angry and most influential relays need to be addressed very quickly. Even if you have very little to offer, identifying the greatest detractors and simply acknowledging you have heard their complaint and are doing everything to look into it, is a great help. This stops the flame wars and buys you (a little) time to prepare for the next step. Since you cannot respond to millions in a few hours, your monitoring must help you pinpoint the most important stakeholders to talk with.
  7. Planning a response. Your monitoring will then tell you what the exact complaint is and how it is being discussed in the media. What terms are being used? Who is being mentioned? What are the undesirable associations with your brand? … Share these insights quickly inside the company and prepare a response plan.
  8. Measuring progress. As you reply to angry comment and gradually feed in information, measure how the crisis topics you previously identified are rising or falling in ‘popularity’. Are opinion leaders picking up your information or are crisis related terms still gaining. Monitor constantly and adapt your strategy accordingly.
  9. Monitor side issues. If you’ve been listening carefully to your communities and to internal discussions, you’ll know what other pain-points are likely to be picked-up as extra fuel in the crisis. Are any of these flaring up ? Prepare responses for all of those that are related to the current hot-topic.
  10. Checking for secondary flares. I come from the South of France, where the summer time is a period of constant battle against forest fires. After a long day or week of extinguishing the main fire, an intense watch is set up at many peripheral point to be ready for spontaneous re-igniting. In a dried-out landscape, a single incandescent log forgotten under ashes is enough to start the fight all over again. Crisis management follows the same logic. And when the main combat phase seems over, you need to be particularly watchful for new spikes. So keep the monitoring very regular and use what you learned in the previous phases to monitor the terms most likely to mean trouble.
  11. Rebuilding trust. If all goes well, your side of the story should progressively get greater share of coverage. Measure how consistently you messages are relayed and how the tone relating to these gradually shifts to green.

Effective crisis management consists if many successive phases, including:

  • Comprehensive pre-crisis engagement to establish a favourable terrain
  • Immediate response, if only to establish a corporate presence, even if you don’t have the answers
  • Laying out of a plan and swift communications about it
  • Walking the early road to recovery by providing information on how the plan is unfolding
  • Re-building trust, which can take 4 years

In today’s instant-information and connected world, mapping cross-channel monitoring to each of these will go a long way towards dealing effectively with the worst the web can offer.

How is your company preparing for such crises ?

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How La Redoute turned crisis management into clever social marketing

February 3, 2012 by 2 Comments

The naked man in the picture on La Redoute's websiteFor a major online retailer, what can be worse than finding out from the Internet that one of the photographs in your online catalog shows a naked man next to young children wearing your clothes?

That’s the situation French brand La Redoute was faced with a few weeks ago, when they used a photograph of kids running on the beach to sell a new T-shirt model. It wasn’t long before site visitors using the zoom feature on the page discovered a naked man in the water just behind the group of young models. Definitely not the kind of associations that sort of business is after.

Obviously, this spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook, which more than whiffs of #epicfail tags attached to it.

Turning a reputation threat to your advantage

The brand needed to react and quickly. But initial response wasn’t overwhelming. A few apologies were written and the offending pictures removed, not that quickly.

However, as with every crisis, when the damage is done, it’s done, there’s no undoing, Ctrl+Z or MIB flash memory eraser. Crisis management in these situations is not about undoing but about rebound and moving on.

And this was performed brilliantly with the following video (in French).

Why is this so good ?

  • It acknowledges the issue openly and then more. While most companies responsible for a mistake usually try to minimise it or their responsibility, the message in this video not only recognizes the issue but gives examples of more mistakes in the catalog. However amusing and minimal the example given, this sends out a very open and positive message.
  • It says I’m sorry. “Again, we are very sorry for …”
  • It describes the plan in very accurate terms. “… We have placed whole teams on this. They have scanned the whole catalog and found more problems …”
  • It opens up dialogue for the future. “… But we know there are probably more mistakes left in there. We are asking you for help …” Active participation of the public totally eliminates what antagonism may have built up in the first stages of the crisis.
  • It uses crowdsourcing. There’s effectively no better way to iron out all the niggles than to unleash the unlimited power of the Internet on it. With literally thousands of visitors eager to be the first to find new blunders, the chances of there being any left in a few days absolutely minimal. For free.
  • It rewards intelligently. “… Since a naked man is responsible for this, we will reward anyone who firsts reports a boo boo by dressing him/her up from head to toes …” While many CSR programs are plagued by iffy greenwashing feelings for being totally unrelated to the social or environmental damage caused by the company, La Redoute’s initiative is spot on. The sell clothes. Their clothing adds caused an image problem. It is through closing they will make it better.
  • It’s a fantastic marketing operation. While some buyers may have been put off by the initial blooper, the video, that has now been watched over 150.000 times, is likely to get thousands of people scan through the whole catalog in search of something out-of-place. How many will actually buy, I wonder.

It may not be over, though. Initial crisis response is all about re-establishing dialogue and laying out the plan ahead. So far, so good. But the faulty company then has to walk the path. In this case, the video is so clever that some will inevitably feel it was all done in purpose. The way La Redoute addresses these worries will probably key to the complete resolution of this minor hick-up. If they make to much of a show out of it, it could flare out of up-to-now benign proportions.

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12 important goals for a monitoring plan

January 27, 2012 by 1 Comment

While monitoring – particularly of the social subspecies – is on everyone’s lips today, it is often considered in only one of two contexts:

  • Customer feedback: by monitoring all customer expression channels (social media, phone, email …) and applying heavy technological machinery to face the daunting task of analysing the huge volumes implied, a summary of pain points can be extracted in order to alter the very structure of internal services and support
  • online PR measurement: since media production and consumption has shifted online in the past few years, paper clippings are no longer sufficient to evaluate the success of PR campaigns and online monitoring is used to complete the picture

While both are very valid uses, I’d like to point out a few more. Not because of a sudden crave for encyclopedic endeavours, however pleasant that may be, but because recent evolutions in the social and media landscape dictate profound changes in the way companies and organizations engage with their publics and monitoring is the single most important tool to navigate these often complex waters.

How the Web was won

This is a chart we use on our website to explain the four phases of engagement that must be considered in any communications campaign: Listen, Map, Engage, Measure …

Listen, Map, Engage, Measure. 4 steps in agile campaign management

4 phases of Engagement in a web 2.0 environment


… and back again.

That “back again” is the essential part! While in the past you could plan, execute and measure, the web 2.0 has changed all this and mobile is only making it more complex. The minute a message leaves your company (very often, way before that …) it is amplified, distorted and relayed at various speeds and frequencies depending on media, channels and communities. As previously mentioned on this blog, this new environment requires your PR and communications to learn from Agile and Extreme programming methodologies in order to adapt. Monitoring is essential to plan ahead and gain rapid feedback from all possible channels.

Who you engage, how, and what you measure to keep the boat pointing in the right direction are important aspects of your monitoring plan. The real takeaway is that monitoring is behind all four of these phases.

12 essential goals

OK, I lied. I don’t have 12. 12 sounded like a great number. Large enough to pull the crowds and not so large that I would scare anyone away. But the fact is that the number varies on your own campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Consider all the aspects of your campaign then choose the most relevant from the list below and add your own!!

So, here we go, in no particular order.

Preparing a product launch

Chances are your new product will appeal to many audiences: users who want to know when and how and how much; journalists, who want to know what to write, whether it’s worth their time (unless you’re Apple); bloggers, who want to be the first to spread the news and gain influence and credit (and traffic); resellers, who want to know whether you have addressed past product criticism, whether the rumors about a feature are true …

All of these audiences and expectations need to be identified and addressed for a successful launch. For a recent and compelling example, see how Nokia launched their Lumia 800 after years of struggling in the smartphone market.

Counting on my fingers, that’s at least 4, right there !

Preparing your entry on social media

With Facebook rocketing towards the billionth member mark, not a day goes by without 20 messages turning up in my mail box enticing me to join the party and triple my company’s revenue on social media. Yet the reality is more sobering, and for every success story, ten companies are realizing the emperor really is naked.

The withheld truth is that social media is not a one-size-fits-all marketing venue. Set foot on the wrong network with the wrong approach, and that free community will suddenly look very costly.

Here are a few things you can measure before pressing the GO button:

  • Find out where your prospects/customers are. There’s no point in painting your house blue for Facebook if you should be thinking of Linkedin instead
  • Find out what the hot discussion topics are. Listen before you talk. Identify areas where you can add value
  • Understand the internal gearing of the community. Who pioneers the news, who relays it, who is vocal but not listened to, who is really influential …
  • Understand critical engagement points. What are the positive topics? What are the negative? What ideas are associated to your brand or products? Are there any false rumors going round …

+4 !

Finding your reputation drivers

As they do every year, Edelman have just published the latest edition of their worldwide Trust Barometer, analysing reputation drivers throughout the world. While I used to be (and still am) a huge fan of that enormous survey, I do have to admit that the granularity somehow doesn’t cut it anymore.

Reputation drivers must be measured on the community level to be acted upon and will be different for every company. Measure what blogs are saying about you and compare that to online media and traditional media. While the main stories will be the same, the finer points of view won’t.

Now, let me count … that’s plenty more.

Optimizing your channels

You have successfully engaged with multiple social media communities, you have a regular newsletter shipping, strong relationships with journalists and bloggers …

You have a corporate message to get across.

Measuring the efficiency of media kits across channels

In which channel is it being best received (open-rates, click-through rates) and relayed (retweets, +1, LIKEs …)? Which format suits which channel best? Answers to these questions are key to optimizing your 1 to many engagement.

Media monitoring

Cheating again! I mentioned that in my introduction.

Yes, but, should you stop monitoring TV and newspapers just because of your online feed? Maybe, maybe not? Which are your strongest lead generators? Where are your opponents being most listened to? What is your competition doing? What is your share of voice on the various channels? All this must be plainly visible from a single vantage point. You can then eliminate what is not providing actionable information.

I’ve stopped counting, by now. I need my fingers to type this.

Public affairs, CSR and stakeholder engagement

Who are the best stakeholders to meet for a specific campaign? Influence is one thing to consider. The more influential the person, the greater the amplification of your message.

But that’s not all. Obviously, you’ll want to know what she’s been talking/writing/filming about recently. Anything about you, or your competition? Are there topics you’re not likely to agree about?

But that’s still not all. What been said/written/filmed about her? influential or not, the reactions she triggers might not be the ones you are looking for? What is her own image within your target audience? …

Bottom line, I promise

There are many more uses and goals, whether you’re a public sector corporation, an agency looking after you client’s visibility, a global company or a niche SMB.

But I hope by now my message is clear : monitoring is no longer (only) a question of plugging a clipping provider’s data stream into an application and counting mentions. As more and more departments and employees are becoming a part of your relations with the outside world, many more sources of information for planning and feedback should be integrated into and shared as a convenient and consistent whole to steer the whole organization towards its top line goal.

Sharing the results of monitoring

Sharing the results of monitoring

Offline media, online media, social media, one to one engagement, events, surveys … all are sources of precious information that need to be considered as monitoring and integrated into your daily tools and processes.

If you have any specific monitoring goals in mind I haven’t mentioned here, I’d love to hear about them. Please leave a comment.

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How your everyday niggles can help you plan for major crises

December 9, 2011 by Leave a comment

My work at Augure implies a lot of train travel, which, frankly, I love. There’s no other mean of transport I can think of that is remotely as conducive to concentration, rêverie or conversation (or secretly watching the last episode of Desperate Housewives over your neighbour’s shoulder, without sound) than a TGV, France’s record breaking fast train. It’s simply addictive and I look forward to it every time in spite of traveling times at which no human should be made to wake up.

But sometimes, French rail just gets it wrong. Here’s a company that has the know-how to ship billions of people across France every year yet manages to blow the most benign incident into an infuriating experience out lack of communication empathy.

Early morning TGV train ride to Paris

Here’s the scenario. It’s happened to me so many times I was able to foretell its outcome at the first symptoms, last Tuesday evening, and had finished writing this blog post in my mind well before the end.

The incident

As the train is being prepared for travelers to board, a malfunction is found in the head locomotive, which will need replacing and will induce delays. Now, for a team that prepares several thousand trains every month and has likely faced the exact same situation hundreds of time over the years, the duration of this intervention is probably a fairly well-known constant. And yet, here’s what communication looks like on the traveler’s side:

  1. 6 minutes before departure, the platform number is not known, several automated announcements have been explaining a difficulty in train preparation, yet the train is still described as on schedule by the hall monitors. Since trains never leave less than 15-20 minutes after the platform is announced, regulars like me already know that to be impossible.
  2. 3 minutes before departure, a 10 minute delay is announced. Which, again, is already impossible, because it’s already too late and the platform is still not known. Some grumpies are already fretting.
  3. 10 minutes later a new message appears, adding another 10 minutes to the official time of departure (that’s 20 altogether). Which, again, is more than unlikely. By this time, some people have been standing for more than 30 minutes and unhappy puffing is spreading.
  4. 10 minutes later, the 20 minute delay is still on the monitor, amounting to a theoretical departure time that is now some minutes in the past. Elderly people are now seriously cold and tired. Human courtesy being what it is, the 4 available benches (in a room with hundreds of people) are used up by teens playing with their iPads. No officials are there to explain anything or give advice. Only the automated public address speakers and monitors keep us informed of the next move.
  5. Finally, we get a call for the platform, just over 35 minutes late.

A possible alternative

Now, let’s give the situation some context: this is the Christmas period, the station is surrounded with caffes and shops and most travelers, myself included, would be very happy to sit it out with a cuppa or get ahead of Christmas shopping. A very early message explaining “something’s wrong please come back in 30 minutes” would be ample information. Luxury would be an SMS reading “Hey, sorry about the delay, your train will be ready to leave at 7:15 PM. Have a nice trip”. Everyone is aware that problems happen and 90% of my neighbours would have appreciated the human touch. Instead of which, a very minor incident was turned into anger and strong language.

Learning the small lessons

Benign crises such as this one happen all the time in all businesses. They are not threatening to the company or its stakeholders. But instead of being shrugged off as insignificant or ignored, they should be used as preparation and rehearsal for potential worse events in the future.

Here’s a team that has the ability to whisk 400 people across a country at 200mph in silence, comfort and security and that ends up looking bad because of the tiny details. Remember that in the age of social, there are no insignificant crises. Each episode is an opportunity to look better and more human or a risk of looking like you just don’t care.

Whatever the magnitude of the problem always ask yourself:

  • Who does this affect?
  • Will anyone know?
  • Should I acknowledge the issue publicly ? It’s not always necessary to do so if only a small group of stakeholders is impacted and can be addressed more efficiently in another way.

Once a decision has been made, inform as early, frequently and accurately as possible. Don’t over promise, be reliable and useful.

If you have other examples of similarly mishandled day-to-day niggles (and suggestions on how to make them better), please leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about them.

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Image courtesy of Dear SusanS

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5 keys to facing social media disaster

June 20, 2011 by 3 Comments

One of your employees wrote something very disparaging on your corporate twitter feed. One of your deficient products is turning your Facebook wall into a river of hate. Your community manager mistook his private account for the company’s social outpost and publicly invited his bros to get wasted with him in the evening.

Ouch!
As described in Should companies fear social media blunders?, this is a common nightmare of CCOs entering the social highway. Although social engagement policies and guidelines go a long way towards eliminating the greatest risks, these situations do happen and should be tackled appropriately.

Here are five ways of containing the wildfire before it spreads.

Dealing with trouble on social media

1. Stay out of trouble. Pretty obvious, I know, but still true!

While damaging cases of crises born on social media do happen (Domino Pizza, Dell Hell), they are the minority. In most cases, social media is simply relaying real world bad news such as product failure, bad customer service or some form of scandal.

If you already have an online community giving you feedback, it is essential to monitor what is being said to identify sources of tension and locate the greatest risks and those who foster them: are they just whining with no following, determined detractors, is the community responding? Is the topic a pain-point likely to contaminate offline audiences and important to your business and reputation or something you can totally forget about? Are there real factors behind the rant? Is it misinformed? …

Understanding this feedback lets you steer clear of trouble or at least plan a reaction for it.

2. Be prepared. Have a plan and a community ready.
Focus
Reacting quickly and efficiently requires you to have rehearsed a corporate crisis plan for all the possible situations you can encounter on your social media outposts (see: Is your crisis management destroying your corporate reputation?). If you are constantly extinguishing fires and never find time to define and rehearse plans, you will always be fumbling and will never communicate successfully in stressful situations. Rehearsing crisis scenarios (product recall, rogue employee, internal scandal, accident …) is also a great way of discovering how you and your team react to upheaval. Be sure to evaluate and update your plan after use.

Also, do you have executive support endorsement to engage online when crisis strikes? Or will you require lengthy authorizations in order to respond on twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums … ?

3. Engage, inform and build trust. Publish great content.

Owning a community online is a great way of ensuring that any trouble will happen on your turf rather than in some uncharted corner of the social universe. It will give you the ability to react earlier and existing fans will actively defend you. But this requires establishing the community on the appropriate media (where people are already discussing your industry) and nurturing the community.

Great content is one of the keys to successful community building. Publishing regular, informative (or fun, depending on your sector) sharable updates will support your PR and community growing efforts. (see: Why PR teams should use Social Media for Online Reputation Management) Today, can your online audiences understand your company’s values and vision by through online information?

4. Think global. Social Media is only a part of the picture.
Is your company purely a brand pushed along by marketing or does it have a strong PR culture? Is the social media crisis you are experiencing likely to interest more audiences than your social community?

Depending on your profile and the situation, you can focus exclusively on the community itself or need to engage proactively with the media and your other important stakeholders. In any case, stakeholder engagement is an essential pre-crisis success factor because it provides a credibility cushion. Any stakeholder you have kept informed will question bad news rather than buy into the rumour. Edelman’s 2011 Trust barometer shows how much less bad news is likely to have an impact on a company with a good reputation (and vice versa).

5. Stay calm and respond. Find the right spokesperson.

In What makes an ideal crisis manager?, Vickie Elmer identifies the three key consistent characteristics that the best leaders display when faced with impending doom. Realistic optimism, a passion for confronting reality and an ability to find order in chaos are all important. And in the previous post, I argued that PR is best suited to handle crisis management.

Whatever your company culture, social media communications require an authentic voice (turn again to Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer: company experts are among the most valued spokespersons) and one that brings enough knowledge to share and a good view of how the company is handling the situation.

How and what you communicate is up to you and the situation at hand. In most cases, acknowledging responsibility and planning believable recovery steps help tremendously. That will be the subject of a future post.

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Creative common images by lincolnblues and Checkered and aMUSEd

Rachel: – Do you have a plan?
Phoebe: – I don’t even have a pl
My apologies if you are not a “Friends” fan.

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Don’t let your crisis management destroy your corporate reputation

March 25, 2011 by 3 Comments

In Crisis Management Failures in Japan’s Reactors and the BP Spill, Ben W. Heinemand Jr writes:

“A potentially catastrophic technological problem, an incomplete crisis response plan, misleading early information, divided private and public authority, ineffective initial actions.

This could describe the current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and its six reactors. But, it also describes what happened after the April 20, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. “

The apparent lack of official response in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis is an inherited trait of Japanese corporate culture that has already been discussed during Toyota’s 2010 massive vehicle recall. It is still at play today, creating financial confusion after Japan’s strongest quake on record and goes against the top three rules of crisis management: “Communicate, Communicate, Communicate” and will inevitable lead to more reputation erosion before that cultural specificity gives way.

But two major aspects of efficient crisis management were notably absent from both energy sector crises turned environmental disasters:

  • A well rehearsed crisis response scenario
  • Consistent messaging

Rehearsing a crisis response plan

The less likely an event, the fewer reasons there are to prepare for it. You may have dreams of winning the lottery but not a well structured plan of what changes you will make to your life if you do. And while executives may have nightmares about worst-case scenarios, their companies often don’t have well thought out and well rehearsed response plans for these highly unlikely events. But instead of thinking in terms of likelihood, a more valid metric for justifying such a plan could be expected loss: highly unlikely but potentially crippling would receive as much focus as the more regular, day-to-day issues.

Moreover, planning ahead beforehand and implementing the scenario within a tool is a much more reliable strategy than reacting when a crisis occurs. It is very hard, if not impossible, to make all the right decisions when the house is on fire. And the longer the organisation waits, the less likely it is to control the situation and the greater the costs at which it will do so.

The prospect of such a plan is daunting and there are no easy rules for building one, but:

  • knowing who your stakeholders are and what their main issues would be in such an event is an undeniable head start enabling an effective communications process to begin immediately.
  • knowing at all times what type of reputation risk your company is most subject to, in what country and from what category or stakeholders, will let you prioritize issues in the essential initial phase of crisis management

ComDecision Risk Analysis Dashboard

Ensuring consistent communications

Who owns crisis management in your company? What department owns corporate reputation management? Ownership is the source of frequent discussions in corporate reputation management groups on linkedin. Heads of Corporate Communications, Public Affairs and Corporate Relations are often cited as natural candidates but the consensus – from what I have observed on these groups – is that a cross functional group including all departments with a stakeholder touchpoint and represented at board level is the most efficient and reliable option. One company call this group the Reputation Leadership Council, for instance. Whatever the name of this group or department in your organisation, it should hold responsibility for all crisis response scenarios.

Maritime pollution crisis management plan

To implement a response plans according to clearly laid out individual responsibilities, a collaborative tool is essential to ensure consistent messaging and synchronisation. Local interactions by the various departments, social media community managers and official spokespersons can then be logged, measured for efficiency and reoriented with the speed demanded by such circumstances.

Crises do not have to happen on a global scale, wipe out the ecology of a subcontinent or threaten the existence of thousands to warrant such preparedness. Think about the worse situation your company could cause and to whom. Are you prepared for this eventuality?

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A tale of two crises: experts and humour hurt more than rumour

February 11, 2011 by 2 Comments

On January 22nd 2011, a teenager died from food poisening after a meal in a fast food restaurant in Avignon, France. The restaurant was closed immediately for enquiry and reopened yesterday. And while the tragedy certainly had an impact on the fast food chain’s corporate reputation, that dent seems minor compared to those caused by other crises of much less dramatic scope but far more viral in nature (no pun intended).

Quick Facebook Update

For example, the following video has been viewed almost 10 MILLION times! It was posted by Dave Caroll after he unsuccessfully tried to obtain reimbursement from United Airlines, for one whole year, when his expensive guitar was mishandled and broken by the company’s ground staff.

Contrast this with the fast-food crisis stats:

  • In the period since the incident, fewer than 1000 tweets were exchanged on the subject and the buzz trend followed a very conventional bell shape indicating a rapid (3 days) loss of interest in the subject by Internet users, with no rebound or attempt to revive the story.
  • During that same period, the fast food company’s fan page continued growing at its normal rate, as if nothing had happened. And while there was some rage to be read on the company’s Facebook wall, it was more likely to be flame wars between supporters and detractors than a consistent attack on the brand.
  • In just ten hours following the announcement of the restaurant reopening, 131 people had “liked” the update (see first picture, above) and 57 had left a comment. That’s almost 20% as much as all the tweets in the two weeks the crisis has spanned.

While official enquiries were not able to link the food eaten in that restaurant by the 14-year-old and his death, suspicion was high in initial – well before any official information was released – tweets and Facebook updates on the company’s wall. So why didn’t the situation flare up into a real crisis as in the much less traumatic broken guitar story?

I see three main reasons:

  • First of all, Dave Carroll is a de facto industry expert. “For an Airline company?” you ask! Yes. For any company. Dave’s PR campaign to support the propagation of his story would make many agencies dreamy-eyed. It found immediate support from Taylor Guitars and guitar case makers Calton cases. It earned coverage in the LA Times and the BBC and was well enough orchestrated to appear on marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott’s blog and as the first chapter of his latest book Real-Time Marketing and PR. Because Dave Carroll is the sort of customer that frequently reports baggage handling problems (guitar owners) and proved to be an expert in communication, his story is very reminiscent of Jeff Jarvis’s Dell Hell.
  • The song is pretty good. It’s good music, it’s catchy. It’s exactly the sort of stuff that goes viral. Marketing statistics on all kinds of supports show that positive news gets shared much more than negative news. Dave’s song could have been whiny, it is humorous and likeable instead. A similar attack on Mobistar example can be found here. Compared to this, the tragic loss of a family is not the sort of news that spreads like wildfire.
  • Where it took United Airlines several months to acknowledge responsibility for the incident, Quick’s senior management reacted much faster, posting an official declaration that felt human, sincere and heartfelt. The declaration provided hotline information and openly explained how the company would collaborate with the enquiry. It received many Likes and positive comments.

So, what are the take aways for corporate reputation management?

  • Engagement is key! Many supporters fought Quick’s battle online. And the company’s open collaboration with many industry experts (with reports posted on their wall and in press releases) went a long way towards quieting the critics.
  • Monitor wisely! Influence is not what an algorithm says it is. Monitoring zillions of consumers like big brother doesn’t mean you are monitoring the people who can do you harm. I have written about this on numerous occasions (insights on reputation, learning from the Mona Lisa and mapping stakeholders) and Edelman’s 2010 and 2011 Trust Barometers state it clearly: experts are far more influential than the public.
  • Corporate values are not just on the surface! While United may have plenty of shiny documentation to send to journalists, it seems that their staff wasn’t really supportive of Dave’s problems. In contrast, the number of Facebook updates by Quick employees is impressive – and effective. It is obvious internal communications play an important role in the company. Yet another proof that Joe Public shouldn’t be reputation manager’s exclusive fantasy stakeholder. Reputation management starts from inside.

So, how are you dealing with the world outside? Please share your point of view.

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Communicating the Complex Energy Sector

October 29, 2010 by Leave a comment

For the second installment of our TV program “Les décideurs de la réputation”, Augure CEO Michael Jaïs interviews Frank Farnel, CCO and Director of PA EMEA at GE Energy and Stéphane Cossé, Associate Director of European and Public Affairs at RTE (Réseau de Transport d’Electricité).

The Energy sector is a tricky one for public relations, public affairs and reputation managers : while there is no shortage of demand for energy, news is rarely considered positive by the public, license to operate is subject to many stakeholders in extremely varied geopolitical contexts and companies are expected to achieve and foster new business goals such as efficiency and environmental respect. Add to this a crisis of previously unseen magnitude that managed to instantly eclipse the Toyota PR debacle and you understand the challenges that face our hosts. In the video, you will see why Reputation Management is the DNA of successful companies and communicators.

Click to view the video

When asked about the BP episode and whether President Obama was right to ask oil companies to pay for the ecological bill, both focus on three points :

  • Utter transparency is required in all PR but specially in crisis management
  • The oil spill probably won’t change America’s love of and need for oil but
  • There will be a before BP / after BP for companies (in terms of risk management, stakeholder engagement, responsibility …)

The second topic in this interview is “how do you communicate a complex subject?” and examples described include:

  • The possible electricity shortage in France in 2015: a sensitive topic
  • The SmartGrid: a technical concept that’s both extremely important to today’s material issues of renewable energy, energy efficiency … and very complex to explain to the general public and decision makers.

Finally, on the subject of new media, both guests agree that a communication plan that doesn’t address their audiences and specificities is not viable. Although a complex affair, it is possible with appropriate methods.

Very interesting answers to all these questions, but you’ll have to watch the video for the details :)

Thank you very much Stéphane Cossé and Frank Farnel.

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

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