Posts Tagged ‘crisis communications’

When Your CEO Chokes on His Own Foot

Monday, June 14th, 2010

It’s been a few days since we’ve heard from BP’s Tony Hayward.  I envision his PR team struggling with rope and duct tape to bind and gag him in the boardroom, posting sentries at the door.  The man just kept spewing gaffes like, um, oil in the Gulf.

To recap a few of his most egregious utterings:

“What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

PR lesson #1:  It is not about you, Tony, or even your company.  It is about the 11 people who died, and the people whose livelihoods are destroyed, to say nothing of the environment.  How can a CEO be this tone deaf?  People’s lives are lost.  Keep priorities straight.

“The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it [the Gulf] is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Are you trying to tell us this is not much of a problem, Tony?  If so, here’s PR lesson #2:  Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Do not attempt to downplay or understate the problem.  It just irks people deeply when you assume they are too dumb to know the biggest environmental disaster in history when they see it.

“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.”

Tony, Tony, Tony.  See PR lesson #2.

And finally, the ever famous, “I’d like my life back.”

PR people everywhere are checking their records to see when they’ve last updated their CEO’s media training.  For years I tried to get one of my clients to develop a crisis communication program that included CEO training, but they always had other priorities.  And yes, I understand that.  It’s easy to put off and invest the money in more urgent initiatives that have obvious payback.

But if a disaster strikes, it’s too late for media training.  You’ll have to get out the duct tape.

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A Mess of Stress

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Quick, think of the most stressful job you could have.  Firefighter.  Surgeon.  Police Officer.  Yup.  Check, check and check.

But according to ThomasNet News’ Industry Market Trends, two of the top 10 most stressful jobs are, get this:

Public relations officer and

Advertising account executive.

No wonder I’m a mess.  I’ve been doing both those jobs for most of my career.  And yes, they can be stressful, but typically I haven’t had to face life and death decisions on a daily basis like, say, a surgeon does.

But I do recall one spectacularly stressful morning when I walked into my office and the phone was ringing.  I hadn’t had my cup of tea yet when I answered and heard, “Hello, this is John Q. Reporter from CBS.  You’re live and on the air.  There are 28 people dead at your Good Hope facility.  What do you have to say about this?”

Well, my immediate desire was to say, “No speak English.”  But instead I had to say that I knew nothing about it.  It was a little after 8 a.m. and none of my colleagues was in the office yet.  I told the reporter I’d get back to him, asked him his deadline, and promised to call by then, whether I had all the info he needed or not.

Then I had to try and figure out what happened, which was a bit tricky because I worked for a Fortune 500 company with multiple subsidiaries, about three of which could have been involved in this tragedy.  As it happened, the 28 people who died were on a ship that crashed into a dock at our Good Hope facility.  And while we owned ships and barges, this particular ship was not ours.

Once I had the facts straightened out, I was able to prepare a statement for the press.  But then I had to get the approval of someone—anyone—above me in the chain of command.  And there was only one guy available who said, call the PR consultants in NYC and do whatever they tell you.

And here’s where the stress came in.  The yahoo at the PR firm (well, I won’t name it, but it was famous at the time) said, “Tell the press that the damage to our dock is minimal.”

What about the loss of human life?  Not our concern.  Tell reporters our assets remain intact. Or some such rot.  Really.

So I ignored our PR pros who were paid a kingly retainer fee, and by doing so I ignored the exec who was several notches above me in the pecking order.  Instead, I went with common sense.  Which was to deliver a statement to the press:  While the ship does not belong to our company, we deeply regret the loss of human life near our facility.

And our company’s name never appeared anywhere in the press.  Which is sometimes the greatest achievement you can have as a PR person—NOT getting mentioned.

And yes, it was stressful, but still nothing like being a cop on the beat.

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BP: Bummer Petroleum Part 2

Monday, May 17th, 2010

In my last blog I said that no amount of PR would help BP if, indeed, they were not safe and environmentally sound.  Their brand is certainly damaged, particularly because they built it to be green.  BUT crisis communications are still essential, regardless of what the brand stands for.  And man, is this a crisis.

Here’s the problem, from a communications point of view.  The first rule in a crisis is to tell the truth.  And if the truth isn’t good, tell it anyway, express sincere remorse and then explain how you’ll fix it.  Well, the leak continues, and as long as it does, BP is in the spotlight.

So it’s not a finite event.  You can’t just say ‘mea culpa’ and move on.  You can’t promise it will never happen again when you don’t even know how to stop it from happening now.

To BP’s credit, they are admitting to mistakes.  They are taking some responsibility.  They are offering to pay all legitimate claims.  (Although you immediately wonder what BP’s definition of “legitimate” is.)  But in a catastrophe of this magnitude the normal rules of crisis communication, even when applied properly, may not be enough.

Perhaps that’s why I saw this headline in PR trade press a couple days ago:

BP Launches Lobby and PR Blitz

These efforts are mostly to respond to Congressional hearings as well as reporters.

The article mentioned that the company has also hired another PR firm, Brunswick Group, specializing in “critical communication challenges.”  (So says their web site.)  But to bring in new people at this stage of the game?  A couple weeks after the initial incident?  What about BP’s existing firm?  What about the existing crisis communication plans that every company should have in place?

We can only hope BP knows how to stop leaks better than they know how to handle crisis communications.

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Toyota: Crisis Communications or Catastrophe?

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Over the years I’ve counseled my clients to have crisis communication plans, up-to-date and ready at all times, just in case. Central to those plans is a process for identifying the problem, and telling the truth about it—the whole truth, and quickly. But what do you do when the truth will not set you free but will instead send you into a free-fall of catastrophic proportions?

The truth about Toyota is not good. Seems the problems they have are systemic. Seems they’ve been cutting corners all over the place. Seems, according to Fortune magazine, they have “a culture that prizes speed and efficiency over reliability and safety.”

There’s just no amount of PR that can change those fundamentals. Not until the core problems are thoroughly examined and totally corrected. When the problems are ingrained in the culture, like Toyota’s, that could take some time. Usually, in a crisis situation, you can find a reason things went wrong and fix it. There have been some online comparisons of Toyota to the classic crisis situation of Tylenol in the early ‘80s. But Toyota wishes they could have it so good.

Tylenol was a victim—they were sabotaged with poison. Toyota sabotaged themselves by abandoning what their brand had represented for years—quality. Tylenol had an expensive but relatively easy fix—recall the product and design those irritating but safe tamper-proof caps. (I’m sure this didn’t seem easy to Tylenol at the time, but they came out with the new bottles pretty quickly.) How long will it take to change Toyota’s entire way of doing things?

And here’s one more reason Toyota’s situation is very different from Tylenol’s. The Tylenol crisis didn’t happen in the age of the Internet. There were no legions of bloggers whipping up a froth of vitriol. There were no web sites popping up all over with URLs like ToyotaSucks.com. There was no Jon Stewart doing a six-minute segment entitled “The Toyotathon of Death” that’s played repeatedly on YouTube.

As a veteran PR person, I would like to say that PR can do its job to get Toyota out of this mess.  And certainly PR can help.  But slapping on a band-aid when you really need major surgery will only make the patient sicker in the long run. Yes, Toyota is Tweeting. Yes, the company is offering whiz-bang incentives to get customers’ confidence back. Yes, the company is doing some public groveling.

But no amount of PR will change the fact that Toyota can’t be trusted right now. The company played fast and loose (pun intended) with our safety for the sake of profit. And all the Tweets in the world won’t restore its reputation until it makes some fundamental changes. And even then, the climb back will be tough. Maybe impossible.

The headline in a recent morning’s paper makes me doubt Toyota’s future: Fixed Toyotas Still Accelerating. That’s not a crisis. That’s a catastrophe.


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