Deep South Crisis Manager

Help for When You Must Think on Your Feet

2010-10-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

Although some crisis situations can – or at least should – be foreseen, many cannot.

Several years ago we created a four-sided, wallet-size card with important tips on how to communicate when hit with a sudden crisis. Many excellent leaders and managers can freeze or panic when confronted with a threat they weren’t counting on.

We recently updated the card, which is a quick way to focus on what needs to be done in the early moments of a crisis. The advice it contains can help avoid a disastrous public gaffe.

Here are some excerpts from the card.

The first page offers “Quick Crisis Communications Response” tips, including:

• Make sure you understand all the facts that are knowable at the time…
• Think through what you want to communicate…
• Develop an Internet strategy that includes paying attention to…what’s being said online

Pages two and three provide DOs and DON’Ts such as…

Do:
• Select one or two message points that must come across
• Take your time answering questions…
• Challenge misinformation or obvious bias in a reporter’s questions

Don’t:
• Guess or speculate about anything you’re not sure of
• Point fingers or assign blame…
• Use technical terms or industry jargon

To get free copies of the card, send an email request to furlow@furlowcommunications.com. We’re happy to send you a few sample cards or tell us the full quantity you need and we’ll send more. All we ask is that you include a little information about who you are and what kind of folks will be using the cards. For many years, our clients an

I'm an Adult: Treat Me Like One

2010-08-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

When a Mom sees her teenage son standing before her, pawing the ground with the bottoms of his shoes and staring intently at their tops, she knows something is up, right?

Similarly, when a cable customer reads a letter that begins, “At Time Warner Cable, we strive to bring you the best products and services available,” the hairs on the back of the neck immediately rise. You know that by the end of this letter you’re going to be paying more for cable. When you get to, “We’re making adjustments effective with your next billing statement,” they don’t even have to say the prices are going up. And, in fact, this Time Warner letter never does.

Beyond an insistence on telling the truth, if we have a No. 1 rule of how to communicate serious messages, it’s probably, “Don’t insult your audience’s intelligence.”

We propose the following maxim to any company that must tell its customers or others news they’re not going to want to hear:

• If you give someone necessary bad news, they won’t like it but they’ll get over it.
• If you give someone necessary bad news in a way that treats them like they’re stupid, your relationship will never be the same.

One week after buying a Baton Rouge company called Lewis Computer Services and telling the staff it had no plans for layoffs, Missouri-based HealthcareFirst laid off one-third of the Lewis employees. “We realized we did have some overlap in employees and we made adjustments,” said the HealthcareFirst CEO.

There are only two ways to interpret that statement: (1) Our pre-acquisition due diligence was so shoddy, we didn’t know we had duplication, or (2) we lied.

Mergers and acquisitions inevitably cause anxiety among the staffs of both the acquiring and acquired sides, and that’s unfortunate. But losing the trust of the employees is worse.

And then there is United Airlines, whose United Express left a woman sleeping on a plane for four hours after landing. United usually wants its United Express passengers to think they’re flying its Friendly Skies and not those of some contractor. But when something goes wrong it’s suddenly, “We are working closely with our partner Trans States Airlines to investigate the cause and remedy the situation...” Apparently United neither maintains the standards for United Express nor stands behind its service.

Thinking back to our guilty teenager, it’s likely his parents would begin a conversation by saying, “Whatever you’ve done, just tell us. It’ll go a lot better for everyone if you just come clean and don’t treat us like fools.”

That’s intuitive with parents. Why is it such a hard lesson for companies?

Lawyers vs. Communicators in a Crisis

2010-08-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

The frequent conflict between the advice of lawyers and that of communicators is one element of an interesting New York Times story on handling terrible news. The piece uses the BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs debacles to tell universal lessons of crisis communications.

Here’s the link to the story, but if it’s too long for you, below are some excerpts and good quotes from well-known crisis communications professionals. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22crisis.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Paragraphs that do not quote someone directly were taken verbatim from the Times story.

As conventional wisdom has it, the three companies at the center of these fiascos worsened their problems by failing to heed established protocol: When the story is bad, disclose it immediately — awful parts included — lest you be forced to backtrack and slide into the death spiral of lost credibility.

“Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,” says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum… There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.”

Measuring success in a crisis

“The two things that are very hard to survive are hypocrisy and ridicule,” says Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington. “It’s the height of arrogance to assume that in the middle of a crisis the public yearns for chestnuts of wisdom from people they want to kill. The goal is not to get people not to hate them. It’s to get people to hate them less.”

[BP] had to contend with a classic corporate quandary of balancing advice from counselors with starkly different considerations, according to people familiar with BP’s deliberations who requested anonymity because the advice was confidential.

In times of crisis, communications professionals and lawyers often pursue conflicting agendas. Communications strategists are inclined to mollify public anger with expressions of concern, while lawyers warn that contrition can be construed as admissions of guilt in potentially expensive lawsuits.

For BP, this tension burst into view in May, when executives went to Capitol Hill with officials from two of its contractors: Transocean, which owned the offshore rig that exploded, and Halliburton, which aided BP in drilling. Executives from the three companies each disowned culpability while pointing fingers at one another.

“What that screamed is the lawyers are in control," says [former Merrill Lynch media relations vice president Eddie] Reeves. "All it did was get everybody all the more peeved at them.”

People will forgive an honest mistake but not a dishonest cover-up

Of Toyota, Reeves said, “When you’re in the mix of these really obtuse situations where nobody really knows the facts, in some sense the facts are less important than your posture toward the facts. People are reasonable. They know companies make mistakes, and people will forgive an honest mistake. They will not forgive a dishonest cover-up.”

Yet seeking a way around a painful public reckoning appears to be a nearly universal approach to corporate crises. In the long run, the best course for an embattled company may be swiftly owning up to its errors. But to human beings stuck with the task of disclosing embarrassing details here and now, dissembling and delaying may beckon as the easiest way to get through the day.

Children stuck on scary roller coasters sometimes close their eyes and wait for the ride to end. So, apparently, do grown-ups heading giant corporations in crisis. This is the conventional explanation for how three enormously successful enterprises managed to prolong and deepen their public relations agony.

“These companies made the same mistakes,” says Howard Rubenstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corporation. “They broke the cardinal rule of crisis management: They didn’t seem to have a crisis plan in hand. They sought to minimize the extent of their problems, and they never seemed to display an understanding for the situation they were in.”

No Guarantees in Life

2010-08-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

We often remind clients that crisis communications is an art, not a science. Even with the benefit of experience, we never know exactly how choosing one course of action over another will work out. The Hewlett-Packard/Mark Hurd soap opera underscores the point.

The H-P board of directors fired former CEO Hurd on Aug. 6 for…well, the ambiguity in the explanation of Hurd’s firing is part of the story. In any case, he was fired over events having to do with a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Jodie Fisher, a former actress who had been contracted by H-P to schmooze with executives at company parties.

The New York Times on Aug. 10 implied that the H-P board of directors had followed the advice of an APCO Worldwide consultant when it decided to fire Hurd. That seemed odd, and when we reviewed some of the coverage online before writing this blog, we saw that the Times had issued a correction making clear that APCO had not recommended the firing.

But the consultant did write a faux news story to show what ongoing coverage of a sexual harassment investigation of Hurd might look like, and apparently that was influential in the board’s decision. Writing this kind of story is a common technique to help a client see how its situation might be perceived by journalists. It can bring focus to the decisions that must be made, and we have used it several times to good effect.

Whether the board made the best decision in firing Hurd is beyond our scope. The point is that, as bad as things have gone for H-P since its decision, we cannot know if they would have been just as bad or worse had the board taken the alternative course and endured the drumbeat of negative coverage predicted by APCO.

Where the H-P strategy fell apart was in its execution. In a crisis, decisive action clearly articulated is required to get people to believe you and believe in you.

Even though we cannot know in advance the outcome of a particular course of action, once a decision is made, it’s important to commit to the strategy. It is essential to speak with one voice and tell a consistent story during a crisis. Talking to the news media should not be a democratic pursuit.

The H-P board failed in this regard. A series of anonymous and amorphous tales emphasizing different reasons for Hurd’s firing made the board’s decision-making process appear muddled and opened the door to criticism from Hurd’s supporters.

In what the New York Times called “a stream of leaks from both sides,” Hurd and H-P have dragged out the corporate melodrama to their mutual detriment. Story after story has offered anonymous quotes from “a person familiar with the situation,” “people with knowledge of the board’s thinking” and “a person close to Mr. Hurd.”

Neither side can lay claim to the high ground or to much credibility.

The H-P board may have been given excellent advice, and the directors may have made a reasonable decision. But because they failed to follow through on the strategy, we’ll never know.

After all, it’s an art, not a science.

An Ounce of Grace, a Cup of Perspective

2010-08-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

Other than a good ethical compass, there is probably no more valuable attribute during a crisis than a sense of perspective. Anyone who can keep a level head on his or her shoulders when under the glare of spotlights generally reveals character traits the public will applaud and admire.

Examples of grace under pressure can be seen in the reactions of three people who this summer were unexpectedly thrust onto the national stage.

Major League pitcher Armando Galarraga and umpire Jim Joyce were forever joined in baseball lore when Joyce’s erroneous call with two outs in the ninth inning denied the Detroit Tigers’ pitcher a perfect game. For those in baseball, that’s not your basic inconsequential blown call.

Fans were outraged. TV couldn’t stop showing the replay even on non-sports shows. But the two men at the center of the hubbub showed calm and perspective. When Joyce saw the evidence of his mistake after the game, he immediately went to the Detroit locker room and apologized to Galarraga. An umpire apologizing to a player? Never happens. It’s surprising the stadium didn’t crumble.

For his part, the young Venezuelan showed more maturity and graciousness than anyone else in the ballpark, if not all of Michigan. He accepted Joyce’s apology with a hug and said, “Nobody’s perfect,” perhaps an ironic play on words. The next night, when Joyce manfully refused to skip his turn umpiring behind home plate, Galarraga delivered the Tigers’ lineup card to him in the pre-game meeting, and they smiled and talked. Talk about a “teachable moment.”

Shirley Sherrod’s 15 minutes of fame was somewhat more serious. Much has been written about the unconscionable mistakes made by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the Obama Administration and the national NAACP for falling prey to a right-wing blogger’s hoax and rushing to the judgment that Sherrod had made racist remarks in a local NAACP speech. We’ll look instead at how Sherrod handled the situation.

Before it was discovered that the blogger had edited Sherrod’s remarks to the NAACP in Coffee County, Georgia, to make them appear racist rather than the redemption story they actually were, Vilsack publicly and unceremoniously fired her from her job as the USDA rural development officer in the state. When the hoax was exposed the next day, the Secretary, the national NAACP and even the President apologized, and Sherrod was offered a new position.

So how did she react? She said she did not need an apology from the President. “You know, he’s the President of the United States. I would not want him to apologize to me.”

And after she got the apology anyway, she said, “I didn’t feel I needed that to feel whole or better,” she said. “If in any way what I’ve gone through can help move people in this country to a better understanding of each other, I’m willing to do it.”

No bitterness. No making the President or even Vilsack grovel. Come down to rural Georgia and see what this place is like, she said to the President. Let’s learn from this and move on.

Even though Sherrod, Joyce and Galarraga may be “the small people,” as BP Chairman Carl-Henrick Svanberg would say, they may offer lessons for corporate titans under stress.

When a person responds to adversity of any kind with dignity and a perspective that acknowledges theirs is not the biggest problem in the world, the public’s appreciation and admiration is huge.

A Season of Discontent: Tiger, Toyota, BP

2010-08-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

“I want to find out what your thinking was…Did you learn anything?”
The voice of Tiger Woods’ father Earl in Nike TV spot

From late 2009 through the first half of 2010, not a day passed without news coverage of at least one of three purveyors of really bad crisis communications. It began with Tiger Woods’ post-Thanksgiving crash and has continued beyond the resignation of BP CEO Tony Hayward. In between, Toyota bridged the gap between the other two.

Everyone knows each of these folks made lots of mistakes. It might be useful to look at some of the mistakes they have in common. If people as smart as these guys are screwing up in the same ways, then some of the fundamental lessons of how to communicate when you’re in trouble aren’t getting through. No doubt there are others, but these stand out:

Failure to understand that the truth will come out.

Who did Tiger think he was fooling by cloistering himself after the news broke of his Escalade smashing into the neighbor’s tree? Information abhors a vacuum. Especially in a celebrity-driven case like his, silence just feeds speculation, reliance on less-than-reliable anonymous sources and the enlargement of any morsel of fact into a major story.

With BP and Toyota, the cover-up centered more on minimizing the damage they knew, or should have known, they had caused:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” said Tony Hayward. “The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting in it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Toyota clung to the improperly-installed-floor-mat explanation of its sudden acceleration problem well beyond the time the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), not to mention the public, had concluded a sticky-accelerator also was involved. Even now there are unresolved issues about the actual cause of some of Toyota’s problems, and the company may not have been totally wrong. But its long refusal to acknowledge any alternative view came across poorly.

When you’re trying to explain bad news (or bad behavior), you rise or fall on your credibility. In all three cases, principal players sacrificed long-term credibility for the hope of minimal short-term gain.

Underestimating the importance of working with – and being seen as working with – the authorities.

Sometimes Toyota and NHTSA looked like two dogs pulling at opposite ends of a tug toy. When Toyota issued a statement in conjunction with a recall of floor mats saying it “confirms that no defect exists in vehicles in which the driver's floor mat is compatible with the vehicle and properly secured," NHTSA begged to differ. Its own statement said, “This matter is not closed until Toyota has effectively addressed the defect by providing a suitable vehicle-based solution." A safety consultant told the Los Angeles Times, "Toyota was trying to say it has a clean bill of health from NHTSA, when it does not."

As for Tiger, this might be a good place to acknowledge that he’s just a golfer. What he does and what happens to him really isn’t important to the rest of us other than for its entertainment value. But, if we assume he wants to continue profiting from being one of the best-known and (formerly) most well-respected people in the world, it should matter to him.

So when he refused to talk with the Florida Highway Patrol for days – and then not before he hired a big-time criminal lawyer – it just looked awful. Every one of us who has ever given a statement to the police after an accident shook our heads and thought, “What’s up with that?” He came across as arrogant and guilty of something, even if we couldn’t figure out what.

Refusal to take ownership of the problem.

Who will forget the leaders of the various oil well entities pointing fingers at one another on Capitol Hill about who was responsible for the spill. Among the many Tony Hayward quotes destined to become part of the American vernacular is: “This was Transocean's rig. Their systems, their people, their equipment."

Toyota first implied its customers were at fault for lousing up their floor mats. Then it seemed to point the finger at the American company that manufactured the gas pedal assembly. That didn’t go over well and was a short-lived strategy. By the time the company CEO told Congress in late February, “In the past few months, our customers have started to feel uncertain about the safety of Toyota's vehicles, and I take full responsibility for that,” the acknowledgement had lost its punch.

Tiger’s initial written statement about his wreck was a joke with perhaps the funniest line being, “…the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.” We might ask: Who is irresponsible here?

For months Woods showed how out of touch he was with reality by trying to control the media. Accustomed to being fawned over by the golf press, he apparently was unaware of the importance of the blogosphere or even that the mainstream media would want real answers to hard questions.

As with most crisis communications principles, avoiding these kinds of mistakes isn’t rocket science but rather common sense. Why people continue to make the same mistakes is a mystery to us. In cases like Tiger’s, hubris must be the answer. In the others, perhaps it’s corporate ego and the unwillingness to ever acknowledge doing anything wrong.

Whatever the reasons, it should be clear by now that people hate to feel deceived and quickly lose respect for those who insult their intelligence.

Tiger Woods' Master Class

2010-04-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

Now that the dust has settled somewhat on l'affaire Tiger, it is useful to look back and see what lessons can be taken from a communications standpoint. Here are a few:

Communications won't fix everything. Even the best communications strategy in the world won't change the fact that a person has behaved disgracefully over a long period of time -- or that a company has sold cars it knew to be unsafe. Good communications is important and will help, but they're not a panacea and should not be viewed as one.
Having a good image to begin with helps. On one hand, Tiger fell so far so fast because he was seen as being at a pinnacle, not just as an athlete but as a person. On the other hand, the fact so many people want to like him helped him begin the turnaround during the Masters week. An investment in relationships and reputation when times are good will help when they turn bad.
Do not think you can control the media. This seems obvious to most of us but apparently wasn't to Tiger. The more controlling he tried to be in the early days of the scandal, the more journalists, bloggers and tweeters speculated about him and tried to turn up dirt. The first smart thing Tiger did was to have a full-blown news conference before the start of the Masters. He could have done it months ago and would have been better off. When someone in crisis goes into hiding, his/her supporters are not reminded of what they like about the person or why they might want to be understanding and forgiving. As hard as it may be, it's better to continue your routine, such as showing up for work and the places you normally go. Without being arrogant or defensive, you'll get to the other side sooner if you look people in the eye, apologize as is appropriate, take your medicine and allow any ill feelings to dissipate.
The truth is going to come out. Trying to hide bad news nearly always makes the outcome worse. If you've had 13 mistresses, it's better to admit that than to have 13 tawdry revelations. A little humility doesn't hurt either. For those who remember Magic Johnson's 1991 revelation that he had contracted HIV from living a Tiger-like promiscuous lifestyle, think about the quotient of sympathy vs. approbation then compared with that surrounding Tiger. Unlike Tiger, Magic broke the news himself, acted humbly, drew support from friends and answered questions honestly. What a difference! Too bad Tiger didn't check it out on YouTube.
This too shall pass. In the past decade, we've seen Martha Stewart, Bridgestone Tires, Mattel and others survive near-death experiences. Mattel went right to work with outstanding communications after revelations of unsafe manufacturing practices in China. The other two communicated poorly but nonetheless weathered the storm, although at a price. In most cases, the question is not whether you'll get through your crisis but at what cost. Tiger's awful communications strategy -- or lack of one until recently -- cost him fans and sponsors that will take time and ongoing effort to win back. With hard work, he may become the better person he promises to be and re-earn a place of respect.

A Latin proverb holds that even a fool can learn from his own mistakes, but the wise person learns from those of others. Tiger hasn't shown himself to be very wise, but the rest of us can benefit from his foolishness.

Lessons from the Frontline

2008-08-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

By Bill Furlow

The Southern Public Relations Federation invited me to fill the “crisis communications spot” on its program in late July, and that caused me to reflect on the most interesting cases of my 13-year consulting practice and consolidate the lessons they taught me. Some of them are truisms that have become part of the basic crisis communications canon – get the news out fast, develop a crisis communications plan before the crisis– but some may be new to many readers. We’ll begin with one of those.

Lesson No. 1 – Keep a Sense of Perspective

Most of us seem to think the world revolves around us, our families, businesses, careers and our successes and failures. The first news bulletin is that this is not the case. Yes, we should take ourselves seriously. And when we have caused a problem or gotten into an embarrassing and potentially damaging situation, we must deal with it in a professional way.

But too often people panic and make things out to be much worse than they really are. They jump to the worst-case scenario and see their entire business lives flashing before their eyes. Believing Armageddon is approaching, they make bad decisions that wind up making the situation worse.

Several years ago, a gentleman named Christopher called and introduced himself as executive vice president of a small, private medical school. He said the person who ran the school’s “willed body” program was suspected of selling cadavers and body parts for his own profit, and the police were investigating. What struck me was that he was laughing as he said, “I think we need your help.”

For two weeks, Christopher and I pored over the school’s records, interviewed staff and tried to figure out what was going on. The police and the local papers were doing the same. Despite the considerable damage that could have been caused to the university’s reputation for failing to properly take care of donated human bodies, Christopher never lost his sense of perspective or even his sense of humor. (Much black humor passed between us, I’m afraid.) He never considered covering up, even when the insurance lawyers and others wanted him to keep quiet.

When the police found body parts in the suspect employee’s private refrigerated warehouse and concluded they’d stumbled on a twisted mass murderer, Christopher remained calm. He faced a huge phalanx of reporters in a press conference and disappointed them by explaining that there was no killer on the loose.

I really admired the way Christopher kept his cool in the face of a serious threat to the university. By doing so, he established his credibility and communicated effectively. In the end, the employee was charged with a crime and fired, and the university’s reputation was not badly harmed.

In 2005, I conducted an anonymous survey of clients. (http://www.furlowcommunications.com/testimonials.htm) One comment I was pleased to receive was that I show “grace under fire and help keep everyone calm and focused.” That’s what is required in every crisis situation. The adrenaline may be flowing, but your chances of getting through it are better if you remain calm, stay focused and keep a sense of perspective.

Lesson No. 2 – Get It Out Fast

Good communicators had already figured out this when I entered the business in 1995.

It is critical that you tell your story on the day of the initial news coverage. Sometimes clients who are about to land in the news say, “Let’s see what they write, and then we’ll respond tomorrow if necessary.” That’s a deadly decision because public opinion is shaped on the first day. (See the earlier post on the Anchoring Effect.) If a negative story is going to be written, you want your side to be in that story – not in a second-day article that won’t be as well read and that will be seen after most attitudes have been formed.

One of the hardest decisions our clients ever have to make is whether to release negative information that would be damaging if discovered by the media but which may never come to light if they don’t disclose it.

I generally argue that if you are sitting on bad news, you’re holding a gun to your own head.

The client that drove home this lesson to me was a recently opened hospital that had three terrible events – unrelated but all having in some way to do with sex – happen in a two-week span.

One of those events was the arrest of a male nurse for fondling female patients.

The hospital’s CEO wisely saw that, with the arrest of the male nurse making big news for several days, it would be devastating for the hospital if the other two events were leaked to the media and came out one at a time.

Our solution was for the CEO to hold a news conference and focus on the increased security measures taken since the arrest of the nurse. In the course of his discussion, he said, “We’ve also added a criminal records check to our pre-employment screening. That wouldn’t have affected the nurse, because he didn’t have a record. But it would have prevented us from mistakenly hiring a registered sex offender as a janitor.”

The third incident was handled the same way.

The resulting news stories all focused on the new security cameras and extra guards, and those that mentioned either of the other matters did so briefly.

It doesn’t always work out that well, but reporters get excited about situations when people in authority seem to be holding something back. Their instinct tells them that if they just ask the right question to the right person, they will come up with a big scoop.

When we release information that may be critical of ourselves, we build our credibility at the same time we eliminate the possibility of someone leaking that same information to the media. And anything that is known to everyone in the media will be much less interesting to them than something known only to a single reporter.

Lesson No.3 – Accept Responsibility

This is another hard thing to do, especially when there are lawyers in the room. But if we have caused problems or inconvenienced people, we need to acknowledge it.

On a cool morning in 1998, a 5-million-gallon water tank ruptured in a small California city. The water crashed through a neighboring condo complex, causing massive destruction and driving about 50 residents from their homes.

Late in the day, in a meeting with city officials, I suggested they appoint a senior staff member to function as liaison to the condo owners, who had not yet been contacted by the city. A young assistant city attorney said excitedly, “Wait a minute. I don’t want it to look like we’re accepting liability.”

I said to her, “Well, it was your tank, and it was your water, and these are your residents. I think I’d go talk with them now and figure out the blame later.” They took my advice.

I believe an organization in crisis has three basic questions to answer:

What happened?
What are you doing about it?
How will you ensure nothing like this will ever happen again?

You may not be able to answer the third right away, or even the first two in much detail. But over time you can and should.

Lesson No. 4 – Make it Right

Once you have acknowledged that you’ve created a problem, you must then fix it.

One person who understands this is Bob Eckert, CEO of Mattel. When his company suffered a dramatic series of recalls in 2007, Eckert not only recorded a video apologizing for the problems and explaining what the company was doing to prevent any recurrence, but he used pay-per-click technology to get the video at the top of the Google search page. In other words, Mattel paid each time a consumer viewed its response to the crisis. The company also took out full-page ads in USA Today and other major newspapers.

The sense one got from watching Mattel from the outside was of Eckert telling his people, “Don’t mess around with this thing – fix it now! (or perhaps even stronger language).”

We once worked with a client who sold a consumer product to its best customer for resale. After about 48 hours on the market, the product was revealed to be clearly defective, possibly even dangerous (though it turned out not to be a hazard).

There were a whole slew of dicey issues, including what to say to the customer, whether to recall the product, whether to notify the Consumer Product Safety Commission, how to handle the news media. My advice to the client was to take the first flight the next day and meet face-to-face with his customer’s CEO.

He did that and told her he had decided the product must be recalled and that he would pay all expenses. He also told her that, regardless of her qualms about it, he had to report the recall to the CPSC. (That proved a brilliant decision.)

When all was said and done, the CEO was impressed with my client’s unhesitating commitment to make things right for her company and its consumers. My client swallowed hard and absorbed the financial loss – but saved his best customer.

Lesson No. 5 – Be proactive, be honest and listen

In 2000, my client, the Orange County Fire Authority, successfully built a massive training, maintenance, warehouse, administration and communications facility contiguous to three residential communities – and did so without a single objection being raised against it.

A friend in Southern California says he still drives by the place and says, “How did they do this?”

We did it by getting out very early and talking with the neighbors, by being honest – not sugar-coating anything – and by listening to their concerns. In the early days, homeowners would ask, “Do you have drawings of what the thing would look like?” And we’d say, “No. We haven’t even hired an architect yet.” They were amazed that someone was talking with them that early in the process.

We did it by earning their trust. When the residents complained that the first set of drawings didn’t match what we had promised, the fire chief sent them back to the architects for a do-over. When our construction kicked up dust, we hired window washers. When rain caused runoff that damaged landscaping, we replaced it.

We did it by listening and responding to the legitimate needs of the residents.

Being heard is one of the strongest human desires. Too often we think of communications as what we want them to hear rather than what they need for us to understand. It has to go both ways.

We must bring affected stakeholders into the loop and try to make them our partners rather than treat them as potential impediments to whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish.

Lesson No. 6 – Reach beyond the media

Of course, the news media are important. But sometimes we can focus on handling them to the exclusion of communicating with stakeholder groups that are even more important. For each business or organization, that list of key stakeholders is unique. But most have employees and customers or clients who must be considered.

Employees are often overlooked in a crisis, but they should be at the top of your list. For one thing, an employer has an obligation to let the people who make up the organization know what’s going on. For another, they can be your ambassadors in the community, helping tell your story to those in their own spheres of influence.

Other stakeholder groups could include shareholders, neighbors, strategic partners, key vendors, board members and home or branch offices. Most organizations also have special people who deserve specific communications, such as a founder or major donors.

One way to identify your list of stakeholder groups is to ask yourself, “Who do I not want to learn of this situation through the news media?” Then determine how to communicate with each of those groups in the most appropriate way.

We once worked with an automobile dealer who had closed a store for poor performance. The local newspaper stories about the closure said the manufacturer was suing the dealer for $6.9 million. In reality this was a formality, and when the dealer returned the cars on hand, the suit was dropped. But he was surprised at the number and type of people who called or emailed him for information. At the extreme end, a couple who was considering sending their children to a parochial school for which the auto dealer had raised money and co-signed a bank note wanted to be sure the school was going to be okay. That’s how far removed people can be and still care about what’s happening with you.

Lesson No. 7 – Engage reporters

In 2007, I handled the news media for the district attorney of Jena, Louisiana, who was prosecuting the controversial “Jena 6” case. My involvement began after the story had been told and retold in the national news media for more than half a year. Opinions about the case were already formed and often set in stone.

When I arrived in Jena, the day before a mass demonstration was to occur, I learned that several aspects of the story were being misreported. The most egregious fallacy was that the incident that led to the prosecution of six African-American high school students had been a “schoolyard fight” in which a white student was injured. The reality was – and no one disputes this – a black student had blindsided the other student, hitting him hard on the side of the head and rendering him unconscious. Several other black students then joined in kicking and stomping the defenseless kid. That’s no “schoolyard fight,” and I wanted to get the phrase removed from future news coverage.

In his press conference the day before 10,000 or more demonstrators were due in town, the D.A. described the assault and then challenged the reporters directly, saying, “To continue to refer to this incident as a ‘schoolyard fight’ is to intentionally mislead the public.”

That direct approach was highly successful, and most of the reporters present at the news conference stopped using the phrase. But other journalists were not there that day, so anytime I saw or heard the phrase used in news coverage, I contacted the writer or producer and explained why it was inaccurate. To a person, they all responded favorably, usually thanking me for contacting them.

The lesson in this is that the most conscientious journalist can make a mistake. But reporters don’t have the right to repeat the same mistake or false story over and over again once their errors have been pointed out. It’s the job of communicators to stay on them and follow up aggressively. If we approach reporters with facts and logic, not emotion, they will usually be receptive.

I have never accepted that we are victims of the news media. The more we work with reporters, showing transparency and a willingness to help them understand our side of the story, the better – and more accurate – the coverage will be.

Lesson No. 8 – Control rumors

As difficult as the news media sometime can be to deal with, at least we know where to find them. But today, anyone can become “the media” or a “citizen journalist” by creating a blog. A crisis can begin on the Internet and migrate into the mainstream media, or it can remain online eating away at an organization’s credibility and reputation.

Several years ago, most companies had policies against commenting on rumors. That policy no longer works. To ignore what’s being said about you online is to become complicit in your own destruction.

Executives who believe the Internet is populated entirely by wacko extremists who have it in for their companies are putting their heads in the sand. Not everyone blogging is a nut, and even nuts can come across as credible sometimes. Big companies like Procter & Gamble, Coke and Starbucks all have pages on their corporate Web sites dedicated to responding to rumors.

When bloggers go after an organization, we should respond with all our communications vehicles. We can create our own blogs, use our Web sites and reach out to stakeholder groups through more traditional vehicles. The best way to stop untrue rumors is by providing accurate information in large doses.

Lesson No. 9 – Work with lawyers

Because of the type work our firm does, lawyers are involved in probably 75 percent of our assignments. Over the years, we have learned that it’s important to develop partnerships with attorneys and to try to overcome the natural tension that often exists between them and communicators.

That tension can spring from the fact the lawyer is often focused entirely on any liability issues that exist, while the communicator is thinking about reputation and maintaining important relationships with key stakeholder groups.

I can argue – and cite well-known executives in support – that reputation is even more important than legal positioning. However, I have learned that rather than argue, it’s more effective to work collaboratively with attorneys so that the communications we generate are effective for the client’s reputation but also legally responsible.

Once I showed a client’s attorney a statement I had drafted for the CEO. He responded by saying, “If you say this, it will double the size of the check we write at the end of the day.” After getting his assurance that he meant that and was not engaging in hyperbole, I said that, of course, that was not my intention, and I would rewrite it to our mutual satisfaction.

Lesson No. 10 – Plan and practice

This is certainly not original with me, but it’s very important. All the suggestions outlined above have a much better chance of happening if we have gone through the planning process.

I think about 90 percent of the decisions that must be made during a crisis can be made in advance when we’re not under pressure. Needed tasks are identified and assigned; team members can be trained; backups are named for the inevitability that at least one critical person will be unavailable.

Many years ago my fire department client did not have a protocol for notifying a family of a firefighter’s death. When I researched the topic, I found out that most fire departments at that time lacked a standard notification procedure. So we created one.

A short time later, a young firefighter had a fatal heart attack while fighting a fire. All the senior officers were very upset, and none of them had had to handle this awful chore before. The fire chief said, “Let’s get the book and follow it.” As terrible as the situation was, the difficult decisions had already been made.

The other important advantage of crisis communications planning is that it changes the way an organization thinks. Going through the process of creating a plan exposes issues that otherwise would only come to the fore during a crisis. A new mentality and a confidence is developed.

No one understood this better than Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. Giuliani led his executive staff in constant drills, planning exercises and post-mortems of every event that occurred. They even developed a list of questions reporters tend to ask during emergency situations. Giuliani encouraged his people to think of the worst possible event they could imagine. “If you do that,” he said, “you’ll be ready even for what you might not anticipate.”

Summary

If you are still with me, I appreciate your patience. You must have a desire to improve your company’s or organization’s chances of coming through a crisis unscathed.

After doing this work for 13 years and closely observing others, I am convinced that we are nearly always judged more by our response to a crisis than the facts of the crisis itself. If we communicate quickly, honestly, openly and effectively, we will come through the worst situations with our reputations intact and our images enhanced.

Public Opinion & the "Anchoring Effect"

2008-04-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

By Bill Furlow and Davilynn Furlow
Furlow Communications, LLC

A recent Atlantic Monthly article reminded us of the importance of telling your story on Day One of news coverage of any controversy or crisis.

Many times when bad news is about to break, clients or their lawyers will say to us, “Let’s wait and see what they write, and then we’ll respond the next day if we need to.” This is about like a basketball coach saying, “Let’s spot the other guys 30 points and see if we can catch up.”

Whatever the topic, opinions get formed the first time a person learns something about it. If Acme Industries is involved in a labor dispute but won’t speak to the media, the first day’s news coverage of the strike will be dominated by a union rep talking about unfair labor practices, low pay and Dickensian working conditions. The visuals will be of workers with picket signs that say, “Acme says ‘no’ to living wage.” The workers’ stories of children with no health care coverage will be impossible for Acme to erase from the minds of viewers and readers – regardless of the accuracy or fairness of those stories.

This is stuff we’ve preached for a long time, but The Atlantic story on estimating the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein caused it to snap back into focus. The substance of the piece, human deaths, is extraordinarily important, but what caught our attention was the science behind how public opinion on such matters is formed.

While estimates of Iraqi dead have ranged from 81,020 to one million, the number that is most frequently cited and which sticks in many people’s minds is 600,000. The figure – actually 601,027 – comes from a 2006 study by researchers, mainly from Johns Hopkins University, published in the prominent British medical journal The Lancet.

A larger, more rigorous study conducted by the World Health Organization about the same time concluded The Lancet figure was four times too high. But who remembers that?

As the Atlantic article points out, “Though its compromises (in methodology) made it particularly unreliable, the Lancet study remains the most widely known. Its conclusions were the earliest and most shocking of the scientific estimates and thus generated enormous media attention. The more careful counts that followed prompted fewer and less prominent articles.”

We’ll leave that study there so as not to become bogged down in views of the Iraq war. The point is Johns Hopkins’ study became the benchmark for Iraqi deaths because it 1) was first, 2) contained a shocking and extremely precise figure and 3) came from a seemingly credible source.

Cognitive scientists call this the “anchoring effect,” the tendency to lock in on a number or fact we’ve heard or read, even if it later proves to be wrong.

When applied to news coverage, this phenomenon means if we don’t tell our story at the first opportunity, it’s going to be very hard to win the battle of public opinion.

We saw this last year with Bill’s work in Jena, Louisiana on the “Jena 6” case. Because the public officials in Jena admittedly did a poor job of telling their side of the story until the case had become a national cause celebre, it took tremendous effort just to begin to get readers and viewers to see that there was more to the story than had initially been presented in the media.

Conversely, while working with a couple of executives who quit their company and publicly alleged the withholding of millions of dollars of compensation, we were able to define the story and gain the upper hand by being the first mover. Our clients’ story was accepted as fact throughout their industry.

The “lawsuit filed” story is one in which companies often exercise self-destructive tendencies. The story generally is based on very damaging allegations contained in a lengthy complaint that is privileged and not subject to libel laws. After reading all the dastardly acts of which the defendant is accused, a reporter calls the company to get its side. But rather than respond, the company executives somehow take comfort in being able to say, “We can’t comment because it’s in litigation.”

The net effect, then, is to have an entire story published with great detail about the company’s purported sins with nothing to refute it. The public is left to assume, in light of credible-sounding allegations and the company’s refusal to talk, that the grievances are probably true. A later response by the company is unlikely to get much attention or be very effective.

Author Stephen P. Robbins, who writes about organizational behavior, says our minds give disproportionate emphasis to the first information they receive. “Initial impressions…carry undue weight relative to information received later,” he says.

And researchers at the University of Iowa have found that even when initial information is known to be incorrect, it retains a hold on our perceptions.

All of this is to say that when you’re facing controversy, bad news, media investigations or allegations such as those contained in lawsuits, it is imperative to tell your side of the story clearly, forcefully and graphically the first day. Like the basketball coach who tells his team not to shoot until the second half, to do otherwise is to tank the game.

Furlow Communications, LLC is a consulting firm specializing in crisis and strategic communications. See www.furlowcommunications.com for more details. Contact the Furlows at 877-300-2404 or at info@furlowcommunications.com.