David and Goliath

The lizard continues updating our crisis comms book: 'Communication Strategies'
Just written up a David and Goliath case study:

Molly vs. Bank of America

Molly Katchpole, a 22-year old America graduate student got irritated over a new $5 monthly bank fee imposed by Bank of America.

Instead of just complaining to her friends, Katchpole logged on to Change.org and started an online petition urging the bank to drop the charge. In no time, more than 300,000 people had joined her campaign.

Bank of America caved in and a ripple effect meant that several other banks dropped similar charges.

When Katchpole started the petition, she says, she expected a response, but she didn't realise how instantaneous and wide-ranging it would be.

She said: "It grew so quickly I almost couldn't keep up with it. And I wasn't expecting this victory.”

Katchpole's petition page on Change.org now sports a "How We Won" letter to the site's visitors, saying:

"Hundreds of thousands of consumers joined the movement to push Bank of America, and its competitors, to eliminate its $5 debit card fee. In less than one month, Bank of America went from announcing the fee, to reeling under huge pressure from the media, Congress and Change.org. When Bank of America announced that it was restructuring the fee, we continued to push the bank until it agreed to end the fee for all customers."

Only a few years ago the options open to a young student were at best limited, perhaps a letter to the bank, which might have sent her a form letter. Now because of social media a campaign can get underway with extraordinary speed and reach.

There are many Molly Katchpoles out there and corporations ignore them at their peril.

Latest thoughts on social media

The lizard is currently working on an update to the Crisis Solutions crisis comms book. I've made a start on the social media chapter:

Social Media

When this book was first published, only three years ago, it wasn’t deemed necessary to include a section on social media. How times have changed and how social media has changed our lives and no more so than in crisis communications.

These figures are changing at an astonishing speed, but at the time of writing Facebook has 700 million active users, of whom 50% log on each day. Looking at it another way Facebook is now used by 1 in every 13 people on the planet. More than 250 million users access Facebook on mobile devices and mobile users are generally twice as active as non-mobile users.

Twitter may be the younger brother to Facebook, but their statistics are in many ways just as impressive. Twitter has more than 100 million active users and the number of users increases by 300,00 a day. In a single day 230 million so-called tweets are sent – that’s 640 a second. Twitter’s search engine gets 600 million enquiries every day.

Talking of search engines: Google is the market leader by some distance, but interestingly the second most used search engine isn’t Yahoo or Bing, but is in fact YouTube another hugely important part of the social media world and owned, of course by, Google.

As has been well documented in the traditional media, newspapers, magazines and even TV news channels are in serious, even terminal decline. Local newspapers across the US and the UK are closing at an alarming rate. But if the old media is suffering the new media is thriving and often the old media is now heavily reliant on social media and citizen journalists.

When it comes to business, Soc media can be usefully divided in two. There’s the use of social media for sales and marketing and then there’s the use and sometimes misuse of the new media in a crisis. The two must never be mixed. (See Eurostar case study).

It’s important to use and get to understand social media in normal times and have a formalized social media policy in your crisis communication plan. If you are new to social media it may be beneficial to talk to sales and marketing who will almost certainly be using it already. Get familiar with its power and reach.

Companies and organisations have always had enemies both internal and external. The difference now is that social media allows individuals to exert an unprecedented level of pressure, often using tools and technologies that brands use to market themselves.

Combine that with the proliferation of camera phones that have ready access to social media that is unimpeded by deadlines or TV slots and it at least in part explains the speed and power of the new media.

What to do?

Companies need to develop plans and resources and what is right for one won’t be right for another, but here are some thoughts and guidelines.

Internal audiences

· Determine polices with regard to staff usage of social media

· Make sure these are widely communicated

· Determine how the company plans to respond should there be a violation

· Determine how the policies and actions will build trust rather than harm the firm’s reputation.

· Should staff be allowed to blog?

· If they are – can they use the company’s logo?

Staff complaining about their boss or their company is nothing new. But because of social media, what was once chat around the water cooler can now go viral.

Employment contracts need to reflect this reality and staff should be given a clear series of guidelines. Then bottom line may well be that if you criticise the organisation you work for on a social platform, there is a serious likelihood you will be fired.

In the past it was often difficult to get in touch with a journalist or talk to the media. That has entirely changed and often staff members who post status updates or tweets are unaware that journalists are using what they say. It is now extremely common for newspapers and TV news to quote social media comments to illustrate or convey a story. Hence the need for clear staff guidelines.

External audiences

Companies may well want to be part of the social media revolution, particularly the marketing department, but most opportunities contain some risk.

Once again a clear thought through strategy is required. You may like the idea of a Facebook fan page for instance where happy customers can leave positive comments about you. Bit of course when things turn ugly and somebody doesn’t like your company then the comments can become very negative. To that end many firms just use Facebook as a source of information about the company and don’t allow comments. The downside is that such a strategy will likely limit the reach of that particular Facebook page.

In general terms if negative comments are posted on Facebook or Twitter then it is unwise to try to rebut them on those particular platforms. Getting involved in a slanging match on the new media may well be a fight you can’t win.

If you use social media, whether it be YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or Linked-in, the over-arching objective should be to drive people to your website where they are able to read your messages loud and clear.

Once a social media plan is developed, run exercises and simulations that aim to create such an attack and try as far as you can to see if your plans work.

Social media must now form part of your vigilant media monitoring. Blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags (themed discussions) that feature your company mustn’t be allowed to fly under the radar.

There is sometimes a temptation to just let young people handle social media, they may have a feel for it but the basic rules of crisis communication still apply, albeit at a faster pace, so make sure seasoned communication professionals advise on the planning.

Such is the power of social media that if you don’t take control of a crisis you can be sure that the new media will grab it out of your hands.

Do you think the editor kept his job?

Blame game

The sinking of the Costa Concordia in Tuscan waters remains an international news story and has seen the humiliation of the ship’s captain. Jim Preen comments on the crisis communications strategy of the ship’s owners.

Captain Schettino, Master of the Costa Concordia, has been denounced as the most hated man in Italy, dubbed Captain Coward and is said to have ‘cried like a baby for 15 minutes’ after abandoning his ship. The world’s media has unleashed its size 10 Doc Martin boots and given him an almighty kicking from which he is unlikely to recover, at least in career terms.

If Schettino is the villain of the piece then the hero is the coastguard, Captain Gregorio De Falco who ordered Schettino back on to his vessel, an order that was never obeyed.

In the aftermath of such a tragedy the media are always on the lookout for heroes and villains and Schettino became the perfect scapegoat.

So what’s been the response of the vessel’s operators (Costa Crociere) and owners (Carnival Corporation) to the sinking of their ship and the vilification of their captain?

Initially they did what any crisis communications professional would tell them: they expressed sympathy for the victims and stressed the need to preserve the environment.

Thereafter their sole crisis communications strategy seems to have been distancing themselves from their beleaguered captain and effectively fuelling the media feeding frenzy.

Here’s a short extract from an initial press release: “preliminary indications are that there may have been significant human error on the part of the ship’s Master, Captain Francesco Schettino, which resulted in these grave consequences.”

In the informal court of international public opinion the evidence is stacked against Schettino, but from a crisis management point of view should his employers have placed the blame so firmly on his shoulders?

Schettino is nothing if not one of their senior employees, but by publicly agreeing that he is almost solely responsible for the disaster isn’t at least part of that blame reflected back on the company? They employed him; so Costa must have thought he was up to the job. To put it another way, if Schettino was so incompetent what does that say about Costa’s employment procedures? Presumably you are not made ship’s captain of such a massive vessel on a whim.

It has also emerged that various vessels, including the Costa Concordia, had previously sailed close to the Island of Giglio. If this was an absurdly dangerous manoeuvre, as now seems to be the received wisdom, why had the owners not issued orders preventing it? And if Costa didn’t know this had happened before, why didn’t they know?

In immediately pillorying their captain, Costa also cast themselves in an unflattering light. They sent a clear message that when the going gets tough the company is quite prepared to toss any unfortunate employee to the wolves, or in this case, the international media.

Presumably their thinking was that the captain’s actions were so indefensible that an early, quick, dissociation from him was their best option. But, laying the blame in such a startlingly early manner can come back to bite you when the full story emerges.

History is littered with examples. For example, initially, News International claimed that phone hacking at The News of The World was the responsibility of one ‘rogue reporter’, we now know that was very far from the case.

The Costa strategy may well be proved right, but playing the blame game early on can give the impression of a company jumping to conclusions rather than appearing calm, collected and in control of a crisis even if, like a swan, their feet are paddling frantically just below the surface.

World Continuity Congress 2012

The Lizard may be attending and possibly speaking at this conference in Singapore in March.

Anybody else dropping by?
http://bit.ly/yFatDh

Calling the shots

Jim's article printed below can now be found at Continuity Central click here.

IT calls the shots

Does business continuity now play second fiddle to IT recovery?

Jim Preen

Once again the big tech companies set the pace in 2011 and despite the passing of Steve Jobs, which apparently most people learnt about on one of his devices, Apple seemed to go from strength to strength - this year it became the world’s most valuable corporation.

Google, Amazon and Facebook also bucked the recessionary trend, but it wasn’t all been good news for technology companies. Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm that manufactures Blackberry smart phones provided a gift for headline writers when their handsets failed to work for days on end.

As the Blackberry crumbled their customers vented their frustration on Twitter: ‘You realise that sending a letter in a bottle and putting it in the Thames is more reliable than a BlackBerry’ tweeted one irate user and almost inevitably: ‘What did one BlackBerry user say to the other BlackBerry user? Nothing.’

The blackout couldn’t have come at a worse time for RIM, which has lost market share to other smart phone rivals. Their response seemed slow and lacklustre and led to the company's stock dropping 20% (£1.9billion) in value.

At about the same time this was happening, research released showed that the vast majority of business continuity plan invocations occurred because of IT problems. It was claimed that hardware failure or infrastructure loss was fifteen times more likely to prompt invocation than more eye catching or news worthy events such as fire or flood.

So is the world of business continuity now dominated by IT recovery? Has technology become so central to our lives that business continuity has become just a footnote to getting computers up and running and staff back on-line?

Clearly IT recovery for a company such as RIM is of paramount importance without their IT functioning correctly they literally have nothing to offer their customers. No IT, no company.

But for other organisations that use IT but don’t offer it as part of their services, the slavish pursuit of IT and data recovery at the expense of other elements of business continuity can be misplaced.

It can be argued we’ve become too focused on continuity and recovery and forgotten about the most important preceding word: business. In any business continuity plan, the core business of a company must be central to its production, maintenance, and testing. While IT may be one of the key components in any recovery, those components must be business driven.

Ken Schroeder a US BC professional says: “Many businesses opened their door following Katrina with no IT support at all. Old fashioned slips of paper recorded transactions until the IT infrastructure was recovered, but the businesses supported their customers, maybe not at 100% immediately, but they didn't sit back and wait for everything to be in place before opening their doors”.

Those in IT sometimes tend to have an over-inflated idea of their importance coupled with the (often justifiable) knowledge that those outside IT simply don’t understand the technology involved. Their natural inclination is to ring-fence their area of expertise. This is something many departments may be guilty of, but it puts IT in a strong position because we all need what they do, we just don’t understand how they do it!

IT departments naturally want to protect themselves from being unjustly blamed when things do go wrong. These days if we can’t get on line or access data at the stroke of a key we are immediately on to IT demanding answers.

The other factor that comes into play with the Business versus IT issue is the cost of recovery. It’s easy for a department to demand a particular IT function right away, but we often have little idea as to what is required to accomplish that demand and how much it’s going to cost.

There really shouldn't be a conflict between IT and business continuity. IT recovery should be part of the overall business recovery strategy. A BCP is the entire recovery of a business. IT recovery is a component, albeit a very important component, of the over-arching plan.

Because business often doesn’t understand IT and vice versa there is a temptation for both to work in a vacuum. Suits and nerds need to talk constantly and disclose costs and concerns and in the spirit of the New Year learn to love each other a little more!