Canton on Emergency Management

Social Media: Waiting for approval can cost you

In a recent discussion, one of my colleagues stated that he had canceled all of his personal social media accounts after recent hacking attacks on Fox news. He felt it just wasn't safe. What concerned me, though, was the following comment he made:

"Before we put any advice out there on Social Media or on (a Federal government website), it has to be reviewed by our PIO and, in some cases our General Counsel."

Is this the policy within your organization? If so, you still haven't got it and maybe you should close your accounts.

The old paradigm of running all information through a single approval authority is simply too slow in the digital age. If you don't get your message out there quickly in a crisis, someone else will fill the gap and you may not like what they're saying. If you wait hours before countering bad information because you "need approval" you're dead - you'll never be able to recover.

It's not easy to change how we do business. Probably the biggest change is that we have to have a unified message with multiple sources of message delivery. What does this mean? It means stop blocking your employees' access to social media and stop having only one spokesperson who has to get approval before using the "official" site. Instead, establish a social media policy and educate your employees on your message. And, yes, this means you're going to have to trust them to represent you.

 

Public Relations: Don't blow your apology with qualifiers

As someone who blogs regularly on crisis communications issues, I'm very grateful for the TSA. They provide a never-ending stream of case studies on how not to communicate with the public. Case in point - a young lady recently managed to inadvertently get a 3-inch knife past  two separate TSA checkpoints.Given the number of screenings that TSA deals with each day it's understandable that mistakes like this will happen. How you respond to them makes all the difference in losing or gaining public respect.

TSA responded to the incident by stating, "We continue to take the discovery of knives and other prohibited items seriously, however, intoday's post-9/11 security environment, intelligence tells us our officers' greatest focus needs to be on the biggest threat to aviation security today-explosives and explosive components."

Think about the message they are sending here: "it's not important that we missed a lethal weapon at two checkpoints because explosives are our real concern." What TSA is trying to say is true - explosives do pose a greater risk than knives. But the issue was a failure to detect a weapon at two separate locations - explosives didn't enter into it. What the public wanted was reassurance that they were safe, not a lesson in priorities.

Anytime your explanation includes a qualifier such as "but" or "however", you're on weak ground. It sounds like you're covering up a bad mistake by minimizing the importance of the incident. A better approach would have been to just say, "We continue to take the discovery of knives and other prohibited items seriously. Clearly mistakes were made by our personnel. We will investigate this incident and do what we can to prevent it from happening again." People understand mistakes but they really despise arrogance.

But maybe I'm being too harsh on the poor TSA, they did manage to spot the two inches of bottled water carried by the person in line ahead of the young lady, after all.

Emergency Management Solutions July 2011 - Public Relations and the "Yuck" Factor: A Case Study

Emergency Management Solutions July 2011

Public Relations and the "Yuck" Factor: A Case Study

Download Public Relations and the Yuck Factor

Social Media: Coordinate your message

"Please be advised of a potential BART disruption at the Civic Center Station between 4:30 - 7:30p.m. this evening."

This was the text message I received on my Droid about 4:32 yesterday from the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management. You'll note that it doesn't tell me why there is a potential disruption and what the effect would be. Since a friend and I had plans to attend a concert in Oakland last night and were planning to use BART, I sent a text asking if this disruption affected just the station or if it would cause system delays. I'm still waiting for the response.

I then went to BART's Facebook page - nothing. Ditto on their Twitter site. I went to the SF DEM's Facebook page - nothing. I finally found a note on BART's website advisory page about a 10 minute system delay and a suggestion that I sign up for various notification services or follow updates on their Twitter site. We drove to the concert.

The disruption was caused by demonstrators protesting a recent police shooting at the Civic Center Station. The disturbance eventually caused major system delays. But you had to go to news media sites to find this out. By the way, this morning I found that BART has a second Facebook site that would have answered my questions.

So what can we learn from this?

1. A text message is not exempt from the normal rules for crisis communications: don't just tell me what - tell me why, how it will affect me, and what I should do about it.
2. If you're going to use social media, monitor it and respond to queries. It's a conversation, not a newswire.
3. Your message should include links to more detailed information. You can't say it all in 144 characters and multiple messages don't cut it.
4. If you have more than one social media outlet, coordinate the release of information across all platforms.
5. Either provide updates or provide options for updates as the situation changes.

 

Public Relations Faux Pas: Yet another TSA lesson in crisis communications

By now you have probably heard about the Nigerian man who succeeded in boarding a Virgin America flight from New York to Los Angeles using an expired boarding pass in another person's name. According to news reports, the man was briefly detained by the FBI on landing and released. He was arrested several days later trying to board a Delta flight to Atlanta using the same method.

One could blog for several days on all the things that went wrong but I'm always more interested in how organizations respond to mistakes than in the mistake itself. In this case, TSA freely admits that "...TSA did not properly authenticate the passenger’s documentation." They further promise, "...disciplinary action is being considered for the security officers involved and all appropriate actions will be taken." 

Accepting responsibility for your mistake and promising corrective action is always a good crisis communication move. However, TSA then proceeds to blow it by trying to minimize the problem by saying, "...it’s important to note that this individual received the same thorough physical screening as other passengers, including being screened by advanced imaging technology..." In other words, "we screwed up but it didn't really matter."

One can certainly make the case that a layered security approach is designed to compensate for mistakes in any one part of the system. There is no doubt that the individual was identified by the flight crew and reported to the FBI. But this occured after he had boarded the aircraft in response to passenger complaints about his body odor.

TSA has a fairly well publicized record of failing its own tests and for letting knives, pistols and box cutters slip through the "thorough physical screening" provided by its officers. (They have, however, confiscated my empty 4 ounce aftershave bottle and numerous one inch Swiss Army knives I forgot to leave at home.) To say that this man posed no threat simply because he went through the same screening process as other passsengers is a bit disingenuous.

The lesson here? Acknowledge mistakes and promise corrective action by all means. But don't try to defend yourself in a crisis by underestimating people's intelligence and relying on a reputation that is disputed by your past actions.