Throughout this book, we’ve talked about the need for speed in crisis communications. More than any other factor, the ability of the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her crisis communications team to move quickly in the early stages of a crisis can, quite literally, mean the difference between a crisis that is contained and one that rapidly begins to spins out of control. Thus, as we learned in Chapter 2, the Chief Crisis Officer must be the type of professional who is decisive and has the authority to act. In Chapter 3, we learned the importance of having an effective crisis communications plan in place—a playbook, of sorts, to ensure you are not making it up as you go along.
But how do you further ensure your crisis response protocols have the necessary velocity to ensure success? Technology can provide the key. With the right technology in place, particularly in those critical early phases of a crisis, the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team can assess and share information about the events unfolding before them, draw on resources and messages tailored to the situation at hand, and collaborate on strategies and tactics to ensure a crisis is managed effectively and efficiently despite the chaos of those opening moments.
“Software is the catalyst that will remake entire industries during the next decade. We are single-mindedly focused on partnering with the best innovators pursuing the biggest markets”1
—Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and inventor of Netscape
This chapter examines technology and how it will one day change the practice of crisis communications.
“But Jim,” you ask, “with social media, brand monitoring, and other software being used every day in the crisis communications industry, hasn’t technology already changed crisis communications?”
The answer is a firm “Yes, but …” In my view, we are currently nibbling around the edges. Big changes are ahead. I believe that in the next decade you will see a wholesale reinvention of the crisis communications landscape—from crisis communications planning to monitoring, execution, and after-incident reporting. In this chapter, we will look at the state of technology in crisis communications, some of the roadblocks and failings in making current technology applicable to the challenges and rhythms of crisis communications, and the amazing places I see cutting-edge technology going in the years to come.
Predicting the Future
“Before man reaches the moon, your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”
—Arthur Summerfield, U.S. Postmaster General, 19612
There is always a risk, of course, in making predictions: You can be spectacularly wrong and wind up looking silly in the process. Moreover, even when discussing the current state of technology, you can date yourself pretty quickly. Consider the following passage from my 2009 book, In the Court of Public Opinion, which looked at the role of technology in the litigation process:
Web sites. MySpace. Blogs. Twitter. These are among the newest tools of modern communication … I have yet to explore the possibilities of Facebook and MySpace … but it’s clear that blogging, social media, and other forms of Internet-based, interactive communication have had an enormous impact on the court of public opinion, and it’s only going to grow.3
Rather quaint, no? It’s only been a handful of years since those words were written, but I sound a little bit like that Postmaster General from 1961 with his discussions of “rocket mail.”
In other words, this chapter could become real outdated, real quick. That said, I recently went back and reread that 2009 chapter, titled “Navigating Cyberspace: Social Media and Other Internet-based Technologies,” and while some of the particulars are a bit off (too many mentions of MySpace as the most glaring), the underlying themes and conclusions are sound: Social media, websites, and other Internet-based technologies have taken a leading role in the process of adjudicating high-profile legal disputes, and lawyers communicating about their clients and cases must adjust.
Even Postmaster General Summerfield was on to something in 1961, since today you can send mail to Australia—not within hours, but within seconds: email, of course.
Technology Changes, but the Song Remains the Same
“A lot of nominated shows this year are actually on Netflix. House of Cards. Orange Is the New Black. Enjoy it while it lasts, Netflix. Because you’re not going to be feeling so smug in a couple of years when Snapchat is up here accepting Best Drama.”
—Amy Poehler, host of the 2014 Emmy Awards
The point I’m trying to make is that technology is moving so fast that many of the specifics I refer to in this chapter will seem outdated in no time at all. So while I will refer to specific products and services, I’m also going to stick to general—what I would call immutable—concepts regarding the use of software in crisis communications, so that even if the technologies change, the analysis contained in this chapter will still be of value. Although the names of companies and services might be different in the months and years to come, and new technologies might emerge that we did not anticipate, the basic themes of this chapter should still hold.
Now throughout this book, we’ve learned the basic elements essential to the effective practice of crisis communications. These include:
So in that spirit, let me start off by suggesting that technology in crisis communications, generally speaking, takes the following forms:
We will look at each of these technologies in this chapter, consider how they work together, and examine why the tools created for other aspects of public relations—including brand management, product publicity, and event management—sometimes don’t work all that well in the context of crisis situations.
As you consider all of this information, keep an eye on the future: Although these technologies currently exist in separate “silos,” performing distinct functions as if the others did not exist, my feeling is that it won’t be that way much longer. I see a technological singularity on the horizon in the crisis communications field, where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies weave these separate and distinct functions together to the benefit of the Chief Crisis Officer, his or her team, and ultimately the organizations confronting crises. In other words, in the near future, technology will:
In other words, like the shipboard computer in Star Trek, technology will one day take the Chief Crisis Officer by his or her hand and lead him or her through the steps we’ve outlined in this book for effective crisis communications response. This does not eliminate the need for the “human touch”—in this case an effective Chief Crisis Officer and team—any more than the shipboard computer eliminated the need for Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the Star Trek team. Rather, it will break down the walls between the various technological functions in the current crisis communications response environment, along with a lot of the guesswork regarding the strategies, tools, and procedures that allow organizations to move quickly and decisively in the wake of negative reputational events.
Again, we’re not there yet, but we’re inching closer.
In the rest of this chapter, we will quickly review some of these “silos,” where they exist as of this writing and how they apply to the specific needs and idiosyncrasies of the crisis communications environment. In truth, I could spend a whole book on this topic, so some of my descriptions will appear passing at best. But in each section, consider the broader lessons that apply specifically to crisis communications—particularly when discussing tools that have been created not specifically for the crisis communications field, but for the broader public relations and brand management industry.
Media and Social Media Monitoring: Effective Use in Crisis Communications
What is media and social media monitoring? It’s the process of reading, watching, and listening to everything out there, including major media articles in The New York Times and the Washington Post, news outlets like CNN and NBC News, blogs and other websites, and social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. This information is then taken, reviewed, and analyzed in a variety of ways to help inform organizations as to how things are going; what the media and the public are saying about you, your company, and its product; and how well your particular messages are resonating with these audiences. When done well, this process is designed to give you exactly what you need to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing or public relations program and point you in the right direction moving forward.
Traditionally, such service has been divided between those monitoring media (which currently includes “traditional” media sources like those outlined above, as well as blogs and other “new media”) and those monitoring social media (what members of the public are posting directly about you on various social media platforms). Recently, cutting-edge platforms have emerged that combine these two functions into a single monitoring platform that collects and presents all of this data to the client at once—usually with the ability to drill down into the various components, and ideally to the level of the original communications, whether it be an article, Tweet, or Facebook post.
As of this writing, some of the major services for media and social media monitoring include Cision, BurrellesLuce, Brandwatch, Meltwater, and Critical Mention. New platforms pop up on the scene daily: All claim to do things better and all have sophisticated, high-tech dashboards that promise to give you a snapshot of sentiment—both media and social media—at a glance.
Sounds confusing, huh? This is an awful lot of information for the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team to digest, particularly in the context of crisis communications, where speed is everything. Therein lies the problem: The sheer volume of data monitored by social media monitoring and other software services leaves much of it unusable in the crisis communications environment. A real problem in Corporate America is that a massive fire hose of data is flowing into organizations each day, with no way to analyze its true meaning and figure out what to do with this data in real time. In the crisis communications context, where decisions have to be made in a split-second, drowning in such data can be deadly.
The symptoms of this data overload are easy to see. I’ve been in meetings with Fortune 100 clients where hour-long presentations are made, replete with 60-slide PowerPoint decks that describe the current state of media and social media reaction to a crisis or issue. Invariably, any actionable intelligence that could help the company deal with the crisis is buried on slide 37 or so of that deck, but no one can see it through the word clouds, diagrams, and other measurement indicia that get brand managers and advertisers excited and leave crisis managers twitching.
I think to myself: This is all fine folks, but we’ve got a crisis happening outside this conference room door now and a public that needed reassurance 10 minutes ago. To quote the Saturday Night Live character Jebidiah Atkinson: “Wrap it up!” Moreover, the quality of the analysis can sometimes be suspect, in a “garbage in, garbage out” sense. In other words, what you see on that fancy tech dashboard of yours is only as good as the inputs and the judgments made regarding what comprises those inputs. (This “framing” of inputs is sometimes the result of computer algorithms—which, of course, have their own framing context problems as well.) With the wrong inputs, you can wind up with skewed data that provides little, if any, insight into exactly what is happening. In the worst case, it provides the wrong information upon which to base your strategic decisions.
An example from my crisis communications work will give you a sense as to how monitoring works … and how, sometimes, it doesn’t.
We were working on a very contentious issue during the summer of 2015 an entertainment company that was in a difficult, adversarial negotiation with one of the largest online retailers in the world. Put bluntly, the retailer was putting the screws to my client in ways that only a true monopolist can. The crisis was playing out day-to-day before the deeply opinionated stakeholders in this community: first in the trade media, then in major media, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and social media.
The battle was bloody, but we were winning. We came into the fight a little late but had worked hard on our client’s behalf to ensure our position was well framed and reasonable. We enlisted third parties to rally to the client’s defense and decry the heavy-handed actions of the retailer.
We also engaged a media and social media monitoring service to better understand public sentiment—in as close to real time as possible—as the issue played out in the Times and the Journal and in key trade publications covering the industry. As discussed, the monitoring service collected all mentions of the crisis across a range of social media platforms. The service we used was automated, utilizing what we thought were sophisticated algorithms to sift through the enormous quantity of social media posts.
On this particular day, however, my colleague—one of the social media experts in our office—came to me with the most recent monitoring reports from one of the leading social media monitoring agencies. Something was wrong, she told me.
I looked at the numbers and something was indeed wrong.
She showed me a pie chart with a breakdown of social media sentiment into three categories: Positive, Negative, and Neutral (so far, so good).
The strange part was that the neutral comments, by far, dominated the numbers. Indeed, more than two-thirds of the social media contact on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets was neutral, with positive and negative comments about evenly split in the other one-third.
This data made no sense. We worked on at least four major media articles in the week prior, all of which were positive. We made our case quite well and ensured that the right messages had gotten out effectively and in language that was straightforward, compelling, and reframed the way audiences would look at the crisis.
That should have been reflected in the numbers. Indeed, given the public tempest over this particular commercial negotiation, one would have assumed that very few “neutral” parties existed in the first place. After all, on so contentious an issue, why would someone who is neutral be posting about the topic anyway? Presumably, the neutrals wouldn’t care one way or another. Hmmm …
The answer became abundantly clear after we drilled down, taking a look at some of the so-called neutral social media sentiment: The monitoring service mismarked the results—not out of negligence or ineptitude, but because the criteria they set up (automated, following an algorithm) for measuring the positive or negative aspects of this issue was faulty. More specifically, they failed to take into account that most of those who posted on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media were linking to one of the articles we’d placed the week prior.
The problem? The analysis did not consider the underlying tone of the individual articles being forwarded, and the headlines and synopses of those articles were usually neutral in tone. Clearly, a Tweet of a positive article is positive, right? If you read the article and agreed with its underlying argument, you tweeted it. In this case, if the tweet didn’t include positive commentary on my client’s position, the resulting tweet was characterized as “neutral” rather than positive. There was no way to pick up the overall characterization of the dispute without taking a closer look at the tone of the underlying article being tweeted.
We went back and broke down the results; this was no small task considering the thousands of social media posts related to this issue. As it turned out, instead of two-thirds of the social media being neutral, neutral sentiment was less than 20 percent. (Truthfully, I thought it might be even lower than that.) Positive tweets, by far, ruled the day.
The positive social media sentiment was in large part thanks to our client’s hard work over the preceding several weeks. Indeed, most of the social media activity consisted of tweets containing links to the articles and blog posts we’d worked on, which were of a highly positive nature. As a result, we knew that what our client was doing was working and that we should keep it up.
But if we hadn’t gone through the social media monitoring to painstakingly analyze each post, there was no way to know that. With that sort of error, we might have made strategic choices based on faulty data. The client might have assumed that a more aggressive public posture, including giving interviews in the media, was not valuable. They might have shifted strategies entirely.
Going forward, we overlaid a process to effectively drill down on social media posts to better understand the exact impact of our efforts and changes in sentiment related to the dispute based on the various PR tactics we were using. It wasn’t easy, but the client was very pleased with the results.
There’s a lesson here that underlies this chapter. An enormous number of tools are available to the public relations and “brand” industries, most with sophisticated user interfaces and highly touted methodologies for gauging sentiment. Unfortunately, some give you reams and reams of data, but not the information you actually need to win—particularly during a crisis, which tends to be far faster moving and (as we’ve learned throughout this book) different from other forms of public relations, such as general brand management or promotional efforts. By the time you blow through the smoke-and-mirrors and realize this, it may be too late. So you must understand going into the process what exactly you need for effective crisis communications response to properly evaluate the tools assembled before you.
Media and Social Media Monitoring Were Not Designed for Crisis Communications
Why didn’t the social media monitoring software described above work in gauging sentiment in this particular crisis situation? Because it wasn’t designed to.
Rather, it was designed to measure consumer sentiment in the most general sense—that is, not specifically during a complex crisis being played out as much in the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and The Washington Post as in social media posts. The monitoring service took a far more simplistic view of social media when considering whether a Tweet of Facebook post was positive or negative.
And make no mistake—dig below the slick graphics, fancy logos, and space-age charts of some of these technology offerings, you often find a less-than-sophisticated approach to monitoring social media—one that doesn’t lend itself well to crisis communications and other complex forms of reputation management. In this particular instance, when we’ve probed a bit, some of the account representatives for social media monitoring agencies told us that the criteria they used to judge whether a particular post is negative or positive was facile at best. One representative told us that they simply look for Twitter posts that say blatant things like “Company X sucks” or “Check out this awesome deal” to determine whether or not a social media post is positive or negative. The algorithms cannot differentiate nuance or “gray” areas—in this instance, the content of an article linked to a post.
As a result, neither could the client.
Creating Something That’s Actually Useful During a Crisis
Is there something about the crisis communications process itself that makes it particularly not suitable to the use of technology? After all, there are now wonderful new technologies for media buying and project management in the advertising and public relations fields, media monitoring and social media monitoring, and mass distributing a press release to thousands of media markets worldwide. There are also tools for mass crisis notification offered by various vendors—for example, when a university needs to alert all of its students to an incident of violence on campus (the “shelter in place” notifications that you see in active shooter incidents) or an oil exploration company needs to notify all of its employees of an explosion on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. (Obviously, this is not “crisis communications” in the sense we use in this book but more “emergency notification”—although there are elements of overlap between the two.)
Additionally, in the legal field, there are new technologies for legal research and e-discovery (the electronic collection and analysis of the thousands of pages of documents and other materials that form the basis of modern corporate litigation) as well as services like LegalZoom for the preparation of legal documents. The financial industry has had its Bloomberg terminal and other technological resources for years.
Yet, there’s very little technology specifically designed for the crisis communications field. There are a number of reasons: First, vendors in various markets often gravitate toward the largest segments of those markets (as do the investors that fund startup investments in new technologies to address such markets—as we see in the Mark Andreessen comments that open this chapter). So they are constantly expanding, rather than contracting, the definition of markets—creating tools that can be used by the largest audiences possible. Crisis communications, as a result, becomes a sub-market of public relations, which becomes a sub-market of advertising and marketing services. Broad tools are then created with mass appeal for the entirety of these audiences.
Although the crisis communications market is big by most measures, it is still a small segment of the overall advertising, marketing, or PR budget of a major corporation. As we’ve learned throughout this book, crisis communications can have a big impact on the reputation of a company or organization and its overall success. But given the smaller overall size of the market, there’s little incentive to create specific technological tools to service this very distinct animal.
Put more simply: Why create a collaboration tool for 1 percent of the overall marketing and communications field, when you can create Slack or Box or Dropbox and serve multiple segments of the industry? Why create a social media monitoring service specifically keyed to crisis communications when you can create a “Brand Monitoring” service that monitors media and social media activity for the largest brands in the broadest sense of the word?
This is not to knock any of these services, by the way. Some are extremely good at what they do for the bulk of the audiences they service. Rather, it is to point out the obvious: Tech companies and their investors are like the bank robber Willie Sutton (whom we discussed in the last chapter). They build big, broad tech solutions “because that’s where the money is.”
More on Why Technological Solutions Are Often Unusable
Here’s another reason why some cutting-edge technology is mostly unusable in the crisis context: I’ll be 50 years old when this book is published. Depending on who is reading, this number will either sound very old or relatively young. If you’re in the technology field, an advertising agency, or a PR firm, you probably think I’m ancient. As in: “What’s this old man doing telling me about technology, even if it is in an area where he has ‘domain expertise’?” If you’re a corporate executive or leading lawyer, I’m a contemporary or perhaps a bit younger.
This is important because it says something not just about the readership of this book, but also about how young the tech world skews. Whereas the software engineers and other Silicon Valley-types who create technology might view a professional at 50 as really, really old, most in positions of power in the corporate world, who ultimately use this technology, do not.
Here’s the point: Sometimes those who create technology are not the users of that technology. A huge knowledge gap exists, particularly when it comes to a specialized, “experiential” specialty like crisis communications: Those creating software for the field have never actually managed a crisis. They’ve never been forced to confront the negative reputational ramifications of an unexpected and fast-moving event. Sure, they might have done some public relations along the way—maybe some proactive publicity on behalf of clients, for instance, or Tech PR, or event management. But crisis communications? They’ve heard about it or read about it, perhaps, but I’d wager that the vast majority have never been on the front lines as a crisis was unfurling before them.
That’s not to besmirch anyone. There are a lot of smart young people who have done all sorts of wonderful things in the PR field. My point is that there is a disconnect, which, at least partially, explains why you don’t see as much great software for the crisis communications field as you do for brand management, positive publicity, event management, or other disciplines that fall into the marketing/PR arena. They simply do not have the experience.
Back to Monitoring
Ok, so now I told you an awful lot about what I don’t want and don’t need in monitoring, whether it be social media monitoring or monitoring of major media and blogs. Let us now discuss what I do need as a crisis communication consultant and what, I believe, the Chief Crisis Officer needs for similar success.
My monitoring needs are as follows:
And that’s it. That’s what is needed from my media and social media monitoring in the crisis communication context. More is not better. More will just gum things up while we’re trying to move quickly and respond effectively during the initial stages of a crisis.
What service do I use? The answer is several … and none. In other words, my company pulls information from a variety of media and social media monitoring sources, but we don’t stop there. Using our own protocols and methodology, we compile this information daily in a form tailored specifically for crisis communications response. In other words, we combine the latest technology with a lot of hard work to get exactly what we need. The result is actionable intelligence to inform the Chief Crisis Officer and the crisis communications team.
That said, my software company (which you’ll learn about below) is in the process of developing technologies to provide this type of automated tool specifically for crisis communications response. For now, we hustle to put this stuff into usable form for rapid response in the crisis context, even as technology is moving closer and closer to the point where machine intelligence and AI will bring us there.
Software for Collaboration and Crisis Plans
In a way, this sets up the next part of our technological discussion, which deals directly with online services for crisis and litigation communications. Services like CrisisResponsePro (www.crisisresponsepro.com), a company we started in mid-2015, can address many of the “silos” I outlined earlier in this chapter, including: notifying the right team for a particular crisis; providing a central, virtual meeting place for the team to assemble; assisting in the preparation of messages and execution of the response plan; and ensuring the crisis communications plan is a “living” document, rather than a binder that sits on a shelf. In addition, from any browser, smartphone, or tablet, the right software solution will bring the crisis communications team together and provide the tools and resources for a more effective and efficient system of response.
A caveat: I use CrisisResponsePro in the examples that follow, and as you might imagine, I am a little biased in favor of our particular technology. Regardless, the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team must find a collaborative technology that solves the major roadblocks to crisis communications that we’ve described throughout this book: getting the team together and getting them all on the same page quickly. Whether it’s your proprietary technology, a Sharepoint-style software that lives on your corporate servers, or a specialized subscription service, every company should use some type of collaborative/storage platform to ensure their team is responding fast and well when a crisis occurs. This is because, as you now know, the bottlenecks to effective crisis communications often lie in the frustrating early stages of an issue or event, when the client is unable to:
As we saw in Chapter 4, new advances that speed the delivery of cardiac services have made a huge difference in heart attack survival rates, even though the underlying substance (i.e., the science and medicine behind cardiac intervention) hasn’t changed. In the crisis communications arena as well, technology can provide the critical speed necessary to ensure effective crisis communications response, regardless of the underlying nature of the crisis and the strategies and messages being executed.
Specifically, here are some of the attributes you should look for in any collaborative software you’ve identified to serve as the backbone of your crisis planning and response protocols:
Technology in the Creation and Upkeep of Crisis Plans
As we learned in Chapter 3, to create a crisis plan that is actually used, you’ve got to A.C.T. in a continuous loop—that is, you must:
To complete the loop, you assess again—both after training and in the wake of a crisis event (i.e., the after-action report, or “hot wash,” that emergency response consultant Tom Mauro will discuss in our Afterword). You find the holes in your current plan, figure out what worked well and what didn’t, and update your crisis plan accordingly.
The ideal software solution would take you through each of these steps. We envision something like TurboTax or LegalZoom, which would lead you through the process of creating a crisis plan for your organization in the first place and store it somewhere accessible from any laptop, tablet, or smartphone on-the-fly. Done right, the same technology would also allow you to update that plan regularly, as personnel changes take place and new issues, approaches, and best practices develop.
To my knowledge, nothing like that exists … but we’re working on it.
As of this writing, the technology we use allows for a client’s crisis plan to be seamlessly integrated into their customized portal and updated whenever needed. In our software, the living, breathing crisis communications plan you created in Chapter 3 is uploaded and viewable through all of your Virtual WorkRooms—wherever you are and from whatever device you are using. Moreover, from a smartphone, you can reach any team member via phone or email, and submitting updates to your crisis plan, your scenarios, your templates, and other materials are easy.
In addition to the enhancements I mentioned above, we’re also planning an automated update system that prompts our clients periodically to supply updates to their crisis plan—not only to update key contact information, but also company locations and resources and other information. We are also currently exploring technologies to refine and enhance the actual crisis plan in real time, as our clients discover what works and what doesn’t for their particular company, the types of scenarios they face on a regular basis, and best practices throughout the crisis communication discipline. (The Chief Crisis Officer and core crisis communication team can tease out many of these enhancements through training exercises, as well as through the team’s actual response to crisis events.)
It’s not the onboard computer from Star Trek I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, but it is a definite step in that direction.
Putting Crisis Collaboration Software to Work
How does the right technology work for the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her crisis team in actual practice? Let me give you a few examples, drawing from our actual experiences with the technology we use. Again, these examples are designed to give you a sense for how the right crisis communications software can address many of the issues we’ve been looking at in Chief Crisis Officer, in terms of bringing the team together, harnessing the tools of crisis communications, and responding in a manner that addresses the issues before you with the type of speed that contains a crisis rather than allows it to grow. Although the focus is on the software we use, the lessons apply to any system you are using.
First example: I was leaving a meeting with a financial client in Midtown Manhattan in mid-2015. I received an urgent voicemail from a small manufacturing client: His plant was on fire, and media was already arriving outside the facility, eager to learn what was happening. I quickly jumped into a nearby Starbucks and opened a Virtual WorkRoom on the CrisisResponsePro software, inviting the client’s CEO and the plant’s facility manager onto the site. (Thankfully, this being Manhattan, there’s a Starbucks on nearly every corner.) In the collaboration area of the Virtual WorkRoom, we exchanged details on the fire and a strategy for proper response. We quickly researched CrisisResponsePro’s database for statements issued by other companies and found a few that dealt with the same situation. We also found a downloadable template to fit our needs, which gave us a model to use. At the touch of a button, that template could be converted to talking points, an employee email, and a draft Twitter post. With the details inserted, I uploaded the draft statements to the Virtual WorkRoom’s DocVault, which my client reviewed and approved from his iPad. (While I was in a Starbucks, he was working in a McDonald’s across from his facility—he couldn’t get into his office, obviously!) With final approval of the statement, we made it available on the company website and to any media who called or showed up at the site.
The entire process took about eight minutes!
This is the kind of velocity that the right collaborative software can bring to the crisis communications environment. And, again, whether you choose CrisisResponsePro or some other solution, or create one on your own servers, the tool you use should bring this kind of speed to your Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team.
A few more examples further flesh out best practices in this arena:
These are just a few examples of the ways the right collaborative software can make a big difference in the speed and effectiveness of crisis communications response and, in doing so, fulfill the requirements we’ve given throughout this book. Moreover, the right system works not just for large corporations, but for any organization that wants to respond better and faster to sensitive issues and events with potential reputational impacts. And particularly for mid-sized and smaller organizations, maintenance and upkeep of the system is easy. Again: Nothing kills technology faster than the sense that it is stale.
Wide-scale Dissemination of the Message
Finally, a word about getting your messages to the various audiences you are trying to reach with your crisis communications response. I haven’t focused on this area much for one reason: This is not where the real bottlenecks and delays occur in crisis communications response; therefore, it is not where technology can have the greatest impact. As we’ve learned throughout this book, it is in collaboration, notification of the crisis communications team, and ready access to resources and materials where technological solutions can provide the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team with the greatest advantages.
That said, a variety of software is available to disseminate your messages during PR events, including crisis communications. This can include software that:
Each of these systems have their relative uses and misuses, which have been documented in many other PR and crisis response trade publications, so we’ll spend less time on them here. The big thing you should remember and watch for is, as we described in other parts of this chapter, the applicability of each software solution to crisis situations, where the goal of effective communications is often to minimize and mitigate reputational damage when a crisis occurs. (Quite frankly, you must remember this point when dealing with any software you might use in crisis communications.) Sometimes this involves getting information about what is happening to the broadest possible audience, such as in a natural disaster or a product recall. Other times, the goal is to minimize, which is a very different marching order than you would find in proactive publicity.
In crisis communications, a delicate balance exists: You’re trying to inform the public each step of the way, while also ensuring that you don’t amplify the event or incident—risking a crisis that might spin out of control. In those situations, a press release distribution service that gets your message out to thousands of media outlets at the same time may be less effective than a personal response to the five or six reporters—the “lead steers” as we call them—who will report on your response in the right way and get it in front of the right audiences at the right time. This is often key to ensuring that the negative reputational impacts of your crisis are contained.
This is an inherent limitation of most, if not all, crisis dissemination software. It’s great if you want to reach thousands of markets across the globe; it is less great, and less useful, if that is not your goal.
Media Lists, Media Databases, and Other Directories
In the beginning, there was Bacon’s and Burrelle’s. Back in the dark ages—say 20 years ago—before the advent of the Internet and online services, we had these things called books: hard copy directories of reporters on a shelf in our offices. When you needed to reach a reporter, you’d pull down a directory and find the page for a particular publication—say, Fortune or New York’s Daily News—and scan through the list of reporters by department or beat until you found the one you needed. Then you’d build a media list.
Preparing the list and sending your information to a reporter (usually via fax or snail mail) was a slow, arduous process. In the meantime, the reporters you dealt with on a regular basis would be ensconced on your Rolodex for ready access with a specific pitch (or, as time went on and we approached the “modern age,” your Personal Digital Assistant).
Times have changed. Bacon’s is now Cision, which describes itself as providing “media intelligence to power your story,” and Burrelle’s is now BurrellesLuce, which is dedicated to “improving the way you capture, measure and connect with media.” There are many, many other media databases out there, as well as online resources like Leadership Directories that offers a database of media, as well as lists of senior leaders in business, government, nonprofits, law firms, and lobbying organizations.
We use these directories every day, and they are very useful. Indeed, virtually every PR practitioner knows how to use a media database to find contacts in various markets around the United States. In the end, as with press release distribution services and the rest, the effectiveness of these databases depends on your goal.
But, as we have discussed above, remember: In many crises, you don’t need a comprehensive media database of thousands of markets across the United States or around the world. You have a crisis … the media is coming to you! Most organizations know immediately the dozen or so top media they need to reach, and their information, in many cases, is already collected as part of the crisis plan. Media lists and databases supplement this effort, of course, but they are not central to overall crisis communications response.
Indeed, when crises occur, the software that finds the right reporters tends to be the same software that is monitoring and tracking who is already covering the crisis via media and social media. In many cases, our first media outreach is to those outlets that have already posted their initial stories online (or Tweeted developing news), as well as those who cover the organization as part of their beat.
So by all means, have that media list at-the-ready and subscribe to a good media database, but don’t make it a crutch. When a crisis erupts, finding who is interested in your story is usually the least of your worries.
The Road Ahead …
There is much, much more I could have said in the pages of this chapter regarding various technologies that impact the practice of crisis communications, and therefore the work of the Chief Crisis Officer. I apologize if I’ve given any particular technology or service short shrift. As with all of the material in this book, I want you to use the descriptions, stories, and arguments contained herein not as a particular prescription or set of instructions, but rather as a conceptual framework for ways of thinking during a crisis, to allow you to make the right choices about an action plan moving forward.
Whatever technologies you choose for crisis communications monitoring, collaboration, materials creation, and dissemination of your crisis response messages, the key point is to make sure your technology is shaped and attuned to the task at hand, rather than trying to shoehorn your crisis communication needs into software and other technological solutions better suited for product marketing, brand management, and proactive publicity.
As for the future, the Chief Crisis Officer should continue to watch for technologies that could radically change his or her ability to create and execute the crisis plan, bring the crisis communications team together more effectively, and systematize collaboration on messages and protocols for response. And as with most innovation, technology moves slowly at first, then takes off with the speed of one of Postmaster Summerfield’s letters rocketing toward the Australian coast. The incremental technologies described in this chapter will one day lead to an environment where the more structural and logistical elements at the heart of the crisis communications managements techniques are facilitated by a thinking, learning, and collaborative new technology designed to specifically serve the crisis communications team.
Action Points
* We haven’t even addressed the type of crisis that knocks out your corporate servers in the first place—such as a natural disaster or other physical event. You don’t want to be sitting around waiting for you organization’s redundancy plan to kick in before your crisis communications plan does. You customers, shareholders, employees, and other important stakeholders won’t wait for that. All of this argues for a solution that is not internal, but rather is housed outside of an organization’s corporate computers.