A crisis communications plan is critical for all businesses. When you are in crisis is too late. Join me as we hear from Marketing Communications Expert, +Linda Zimmer . Linda is person to follow, know and learn from.
She can be found EVERYWHERE that is digital and is called upon from companies and institutions around the world for guidance, planning and education.
Highlights include:
10:50 - Do you have a place on your site with a list of whom to contact at your company for crisis situations? You’d be surprised how hard it can be to find the person YOU would want to be the POINT person.
13:03 - What is a REAL crisis? It’s in REAL time and needs to be dealt with NOW
13:48 - Small businesses need a plan more than ever because one crisis can take out your company.
14:15 - Remembering how the big change in Google search semantics has affected many small businesses who relied on keyword stuffing, SEO the “old way”
14:45 Google can change their algorithms overnight - if that’s what you count on, then that has be part of your plan.
20:15 - Social media is about
23:54 - Know what your company represents
24:11 - Without a known message and tone, your response can become fragmented causing more damage to your company than the crisis itself
30:29 - seeking legal council with your plan
37:39 - GEM: Know the difference between being right and being effective.
40:00 - GEM: Ask the question, “What can derail our success?” - those are your hotspots
44:28 - Caution against only relying on online media to get your crisis situation plan deployed. You need to include more traditional forms of communication because perhaps it’s your site and the internet that have gone down and your phone lines are exploding with frustrated customers.
51:00 - Who is creating your corporate message and maintaining it online? Was it the intern? The person who no longer works there? You need to have access to ALL accounts
GRAB EVERY PROFILE/VANITY URL with your name, your company name or brand name or someone else will. This will give a consistent message and the public will know it’s coming from you and will not be confused.
This is not an event to be missed. Linda, who is a collaborative, liquid being said it would be great to get a couple of additional experts in the discussion in the filmstrip. If you think yourself an expert on this topic and would want to join in, please let me know.
You can get to know Linda Zimmer better here:
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lzimmer
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lgzimmer
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/znetlady/
MarcomInteractive: http://www.marcominteractive.com/
Full show transcript here:
Susan Finch: Hello! This is Susan Finch and today I’m with
Sales Lead Management Association Radio, the SLMARadio.com and today we are
talking with Linda Zimmer, who is a communications expert who has traveled the world teaching and coaching and helping people do it better as far as their
crisis communication plans and marketing plans, their strategies on a better
way to reach their audience. She and I have known each other for about twenty
years and I’m so excited to have her here. We’re also joined by a friend of
mine, David Leopold, who is another social media expert and I enjoy David and his interviews and some of the questions he comes up with. I thought the three
of us could have a wonderful conversation today and learn some things from
Linda about crisis communication plans. With that Linda, I want to welcome you!
Linda Zimmer: Thank you! It’s delightful to be here.
Susan: We’re just glad to have you and David, happy to have
you too this morning. Thank you for joining us.
David Leopold: I always look forward to challenges Susan and
you challenge me so I said, “Let’s go for it.” I love challenges!
Susan: Oh thanks. Linda, I’m wondering if you can give us a
brief background in your experience in this field and then cover the basic
terminology of crisis communication before we dive into it.
Linda: Sure. Probably the first challenge I had as a young
strategist as far as crisis communication was in the days before the world wide
web and that was a products company whose dog chews were breaking up and causing
choking in dogs and they had no idea that this crisis was even going on because
it was happening then in the invisible world of list serves and email lists.
They only found out about it when pet stores started pulling the product off
the shelves and sending it back and refusing deliveries and so this hit them
truly, truly coming out of nowhere as far as they were concerned and so we put
together a strategy to engage with the unhappy customers and the vendors in
resolving this issue. From there I sort of became this person who knew about
these invisible worlds where crisis do tend to develop and in fact a recent
study was done that the epicenter today of where communication crisis often
happens is on Twitter. I sort of run the gamut from real life to virtual crises
so that’s a little bit of the background. As far as the terminology, I don’t
know that there’s any special terminology except maybe for the word ‘crisis
communication’ in and of itself. A crisis can be anything from a natural
disaster obviously to some of the really horrendous things we’ve seen like
shootings, things that you have no control over, but it can also be an employee
going out there on Facebook and saying something that is perhaps really
disastrous to your company and so crisis really in my book is any kind of
communication that requires immediate and sustained management.
Susan: No, I think that’s a good definition because a lot of
people only think tragedies, the company CEO gets hit by a car or something or
is caught on the news doing something lewd with somebody, it isn’t just that.
Linda: Right and most of the time the crises are completely
out of your control. We just look at Target. While it can be argued that it
possibly was within their control, it’s usually something that blindsides you.
It’s something that you didn’t prepare for. It’s one of those black swans that
just sort of come out of nowhere and you have not prepared for it.
David: Does crisis imply by its very nature that we must be
reactive to the situation instead of maybe being proactive to prevent, certain
things happen that we absolutely have not control over, but it’s amazing to me
that the very first story that you shared Linda was one where a company’s
product was being challenged and they really didn’t know their product was
being challenged. That is crazy that they didn’t have follow up marketing
strategies in place that made sure the customers were satisfied with their
product, but for a customer to tell you and it sounds like it was a pretty big
crisis. That’s just amazing to me.
Linda: Yes, it was a huge crisis and of course when it’s
hitting your bottom line, it’s not only your customers who are hurt, but if
you’re a larger company who has shareholders, this is a big deal. This happened
at a time where we didn’t have visible social media like we have today, but I
do think it underscores a really important point about communication channels
and if you are not up to date on the latest type of communication channel and
you’re still relying on email and fax machines and telephones to figure out
what’s going on in your marketplace, as a professional that’s bordering on
malpractice. Seriously, you need to at least be aware of the fact that these
communication channels are potentially ones that your customers or vendors or
suppliers are using and that doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in
them, but you need to at least be aware that they exist and so you cannot just
put the blinders on and say, “Hey the way we did business has always
worked for us. It’s going to continue to work because that’s exactly where the
crisis will erupt, the place where you’re not looking and you’re not monitoring
and you’re not bringing in to at least the landscape of the things that you
might have to deal with and crisis communication, yes it does imply a reactive.
However, I do love the term ‘risk management’, but that’s sort of not what we
think of in terms of communications, but that is exactly what you were
referring to is how do we be proactive and how do we prepare ourselves for a
time where we’re going to really have to sustain and manage communication.
David: Like it or not, and I’m not a Twitter user at all
virtually, but Twitter has changed the world dramatically because now we have
millions upon millions of reporters if you will who can create a crisis if they
want to and it’s really challenging. Susan how do you tell your clients how to
prepare for things like this? What is a good strategy?
Susan: For me, for most of my clients there are like four or
five in particular, my heavier clients and we do come up with a plan. It’s a
statement. It’s a hierarchy of contacts so we know who to reach in different
situations. We know who to reach after hours and how if something came up. Most
of the time I have to admit I’m not available in the middle of the night so for
them to understand what their own plan is and to be able to execute it on their
own without needing me to do it, I think that’s the best thing I can do for
them and one of the best services I can give them is to help them create, this
is what we do. This is where we hid it. This is how we get into these accounts
and because maybe they aren’t the person who usually logs into the Twitter
account. They might not be the person who logs into the website so for them to
have that list of, if something bad happens or if you need to quickly
distribute a message out there, this is who we hit. In a small scale that’s
what I do. We can get into more elaborate plans and I have with certain
clients, but primarily that’s what I target. I work usually with smaller
business and organizations so we can usually knock out a list usually within an
hour or two and a plan, but the other thing I’ve learned I had to do, I learned
this down South when we had [unintelligible] for a client. If you have a board
that comes in and speaks on your behalf and every year the board rotates, you
need to train the board and you need to teach them how to be a spokesperson
because they’re the ones people are going to find and they’re the ones that the
media will come up to when something strange or bazaar happens just to get a
good sound bite and you have to be ready. You have to be ready with your not no
comment and if they are finding you on Twitter and starting to mention things
or it goes out wherever the broadcast is and this is more with traditional
media, with television, radio and newspaper because that’s when those things
happen. Somebody is out there on the scene wanting to talk to somebody and they
will find anybody so to teach your clients to be the somebody they find so the
right message is distributed is also critical.
Linda: That also points to some really tactical things like
do you have on your website who a contact is because not only does internally
appointing that person, but externally communicating that so you see this on
many big brand websites. You’ll go to the newsroom or you’ll have a contact
page and there listed is media inquiries or emergency contact or whatever and
if you supply that, those are probably the first places that a person who is
interested in getting a comment is going to go. When you don’t supply that and
you don’t give people the communication channel that you would prefer, you
don’t even give them the opportunity to follow your protocols, you basically
excluded them. Whether they’re going to follow it or not is up in the air, but
you certainly need to provide that channel.
David: I was going to ask Linda, excuse me for asking the
question, but are you the crisis doctor? When I say that, obviously people will
know to come to you because they have a problem because of your reputation and
being able to handle crisis situations, but once again I would ask the
question. How many folks proactively come to you and say, “Linda we need
you to put a crisis management strategy into place in case we have to use
it.”?
Linda: I would say a handful of clients have actually
approached me when they are in the middle of a crisis. Who is it on television,
the scandal where she comes in and she’s the fixer, but for most of my clients,
this is something that we do as part of our initial review as they engage me is
what do we have in place as far as communication during an urgent and real time
unfolding situation and that’s really what a crisis is. It’s sort of a real
time unfolding communications management issue so the idea that you can wait
until you’re really sick and you need the doctor is really undermining what the
effectiveness of your communications could be. If you took as Susan said a few
hours for big organization, it could be days to really plan out and big brands
do this regularly, most of them, where they scenario play and how do we handle
this and smaller businesses tend not to do that, but it’s equally not as able
and more important for small businesses who might not be able to recover. Case
in point, in the tech industry the changes to Google have been a really big
topic. What’s happening to page rank and what’s happening to search engine
optimization? These changes in Google hit some companies so hard because they
relied on search engines for traffic on their ecommerce sites that they
literally went out of business within a few weeks because their page rank was
hit so hard that they were pushed down to oblivion and disability. How many of
us would really think to think that if our business relied so much on search,
how do we plan for a change that we have no control over? Google can change
their [unintelligible] over night and that can affect our business. What kinds
of communication to other communication channels have we opened with our
customers so that we can pivot? For a big organization who has billions of
dollars in the bank and dealing with a crisis is part of doing business. For a
small business, it could mean the difference between being in business or not.
David: You bring up a great point and I think we need to
call in Dr. David [unintelligible] who will talk about
Susan: That’s exactly what I was thinking.
David: Well because hummingbird [unintelligible] changed it.
Google did. It was the first major change made in thirteen years so that was a
big one and some folks were kind of prepared for it. Most of the world was not
prepared for it, but to your point Linda, Google can make a quick change very,
very quickly and folks not know about it and then have to react to that
situation and [unintelligible] and David [unintelligible] is the champion of
search and if you read, he talks about it and I’m going to ask this question
next time I have an opportunity to chat with him, because he does talk to
international companies. He has a lot of international companies who are his
clients. I would like to know how he helps them or talks about it and how the
word ‘crisis’ enters into the discussion. You’re right Linda, a crisis with a
large company can be absorbed somehow hopefully. With a small business they can
be out of business within twenty-four hours.
Susan: But this comes down to the same thing about tactical
research and preparation. Linda you hit on it. If someone is relying so heavily
on search engine optimization or that type of situation for their business to
grow and stay alive, you have to take that responsibility because I’ve seen
companies and it’s like, “It’s changed and business is bad”. Well,
that’s not good enough. If that’s your business, you better be in the groups
with your finger on the pulse of every bit of this research and the change is
coming asking questions and being ready because you can’t just put your head in
the sand and say, “Oh how sad. Look what happened to me.” You had a
choice. You need to stay informed and know that that’s part of your plan. If
that’s where your future lies and that has to be part of your plan to stay on
top of that wherever your future is.
Linda: Absolutely, absolutely. Just a week or so ago I gave
a presentation to a large group of small business people and it’s interesting
that the attitude about on line media, social media is very secondary in terms
of their business strategy. A lot of people dismiss it. It really takes a big
commitment and time and there’s not enough time and I really stress that this
is exactly the same way that you do business in the real world and that is you
build a trust network. Susan you started this up by introducing us and what our
relationship was to each other because we built a trust among us and that is
how most people do business. If you’re a big brand that’s a little tougher to
do, but a small business more and more and more I hear, “Oh I do business
on referral” “I do business via search engine” “I do
business because people know I am an expert is xyz” and if one of your
mechanisms for building that trust is compromised, you ought to have a
distributed network that you can pivot and shift and so when we think about
social media we can’t think about it as a channel in which to get followers.
What we have to think of it as is an insurance program for our trusted networks
and that’s possibly our customers, our vendors, our suppliers, whoever our
stakeholders are in our business so that we have multiple ways to get in touch
with them. We’ve got email, we’ve got FedEx, we’ve got telephone and there’s
all of these other channels where our customers and other stakeholders might be
and so it’s really important to be looking across the landscape and creating
what I call a distributed network so that you can gather people in the event
that something like a crisis happens and you can still continue to communicate
with them. I mean it’s sort of disaster recovery 101, right?
Susan: Definitely and that is about just sticking it all in
one place, when it shifts, what is your plan b?
Linda: Right. Let me kind of go back to where we focused on
overriding tactical things, but I think the first step in preparing for crisis
communication is really knowing who you are. By that I mean are we the
happiness company? Coca Cola is known as the happiness company. We deliver
happiness and it has nothing to do with the beverage and everything to do with
our experience and what we’re doing. If you are a company that like Susan your Binky Patrol is all about kids and comfort for kids. If you really know in your
core who you are, that is the first step because in a crisis, you mentioned the
board members and executive and everything else. In a crisis if we all have a
really clear definition of who we are as a company, our communication falls in
line and we know who our natural alliances are as well if we need them. If
we’re all about kids, we might look across the landscape and say, “These
organizations are also about kids. We might want to connect with them just so
we can start building a relationship with them because in the event something
happens to us, they become our natural alliance.” Most individuals, it’s
really interesting. If you ask them to declare in six words or seven words or
less who they are, they struggle with it. They cannot do it. I saw this with a
huge tech brand where the CEO was being interviewed on one of the business
shows and was asked, “You’re this great big company and you have all of
these divisions, who are you in five words or less” and the CEO could not
do it. He could not do it and that was unfortunate because it was on live
radio. The point is, if you know at your core what you are at your core
regardless of what your message is around the crisis is, you can be pulling
together messages that go right to that core whether it’s kids or happiness or
health or whatever it is so even in that crisis, you can keep to your core as
you’re dealing with it.
Susan: All right. How do you bring that out? That’s another
service to give a client and it’s one of those basic introductory things as you
get to know each other. Nail that. They have to know it because if they’re not
confident in those five to seven words, they will always fumble because they
will never be able to go back to home when they need to settle in and step back
and get back to where we belong and speak from that place if they don’t know
where that place is.
Linda: Exactly so no matter what, let’s just say we’re all
about happiness, you can always give yourself that five seconds or thirty
seconds or ten seconds to think while you’re saying, “as you know our
company represents happiness” and that allows you to bridge whatever your
comment is, but if you haven’t internalized that as a board, as an executive,
as the person who answers the phone, then it does become a situation where
you’re communication becomes fragmented and you are not delivering the right
messages around whatever it is that you’re trying to manage at that point.
Susan: And we’re back with Linda Zimmer on SLMA Radio and during
this HOA as well, we are talking about crisis communication plans and what you
need to have in place as a small business, a large business, but primarily
small business because as Linda covered in the first half hour, one crisis can
take you down. Don’t let that happen. Be ready and part of what we were ending
with in the last half hour was identifying who we are. Who are you as a
business? What is your core message in five to seven words? Can you do it? Do
you know it? If you don’t, you need to figure it out. With that, back to you
Linda.
Linda: Thanks. I also think there’s a really philosophical
question as you’re preparing and as you’re sort of in your mode. Okay if
something happens we now know our messaging. The next thing is to ask,
“What’s our philosophy about communication?” and that sounds almost
like a medi-question, but if you don’t know the philosophy and by that I mean
is it fight? Is it flight? Is it engage? Is it [unintelligible]? Is it turn it
over to our attorneys? If you can’t answer what that kind of philosophical
basis is, that’s a problem because first of all, if you have a philosophy of if
something goes wrong in this company we’re going to face it and engage with it,
apologize for it or whatever, then the next question is does that philosophy
match your legal counsel’s philosophy on communications? What I have seen
happen in really, really big brands is the company has the philosophy of we’re
going to engage and we’re going to face it. The lawyers then in a crisis are
the first ones that are called in and they have a completely different
philosophy about how to handle communication and any smart executive is going
to defer to their legal counsel when something like this happens, but if those
two philosophies are at odds, that’s going to damage your brand probably more
than the crisis itself because people have come to expect that you’re going to
face and engage, you’re going to stand your ground and fight or whatever it is,
and all of a sudden you go silent because that’s exactly what your lawyers have
told you to do at that point. Just shut it all down. That is a miscommunication
of your brand. It seems like a stupid question to ask perhaps, but it really
gets to the heart of when you’re in a crisis mode, how are you going to respond?
Susan: I’ve seen that happen in companies where the two
don’t agree and what happens is when the key contact people listen to the
opposing method of handling it, the rest of the group that was so used to
handling things a certain way of being up front and being open, they feel
betrayed and the trust is beaten down almost instantaneously because they not
only feel betrayed, but they feel lost. It’s like I won’t do it right now. I’m
going to do it wrong because they were doing it wrong and the confidence and
everything is just destroyed.
David: Isn’t everything thought ultimately going to end up
with how your attorneys say that it should be handled? Isn’t that going to be
the ultimate resolution? To your point, maybe in all crisis, management should
come out of all legal departments, totally out of legal departments and not out
of marketing departments, but the legal department who has a marketing person
in their department because they’re going to have to be the ones to either
defend or prosecute. They’re going to have to do one of those two things and so
maybe that’s the place to start.
Linda: Well it is and in fact that’s why I raised the
question. You can sit around your conference room and say, “Let’s do a
scenario about a shooting at the theater” and do all the crisis planning
among all the people inside your company, but if you don’t include your legal
counsel in the scenario making, it’s a huge gap because what you’re inviting
then in this scenario that we’re talking about is you guys are really well
prepared and your legal counsel comes in and says that’s not how we would
handle it in that situation so while I wouldn’t say that your legal department
is the best person or place to put the lead, they definitely are ones that
should be part of your scenario planning. They need to have a voice at the
table. They will guide the situation. They will be at the lead guiding you
internally during the crisis which is why it is so important for them to be
part of this discussion of if we’re a company that believes in engaging and
that’s what we’ve done all along, now that a crisis hits, legal counsel how do
we navigate our engagement philosophy with this situation and you need to bring
your legal counsel in to have those discussions about something as simple as an
employee goes onto Facebook and talks about, and I’ve actually seen this
happen, where they’re live tweeting a massive layoff at a company and believe
it or not, the marketing and PR department Susan to your point, didn’t have
passwords. Legal counsel sitting next to you on work force issues ought to be
part of that scenario planning.
Susan: David and I talked about that and I’m small. I’m a
solo that brings in team members. I can bring in a lot of great experts on
things, but because I’m solo and I value my clients so much, I don’t have legal
counsel at my fingertips all the time. Usually it is only when I truly need it
because I’m not in that budget. What I’ve come up with though is a true plan
that this is who handles which piece of everything. These are the three people
who have the access to all of the passwords. This is the one person who has
access to all of the financial things if something happens and then they all
know each other and I’ve put them all into a circle on Google Plus that the
person who has access to my accounts, she can get in and post something and can
immediately get a hold of all these people and she has something in drive where
she can reach the people for the different pieces. Okay, this is what we have.
What are we going to do and how do we help the clients that are relying on her
and how can we help the family? Whatever the piece is that needs help and it’s
kind of like when people do estate planning and other things. Everyone is going
to talk about when I die, it’s so depressing. Put on your big girl pants. Do
this. That’s what you have to do. You have to do this and what it does too is
when you have these things in place and you revisit them every few months
because you should, you should review quarterly is that who I want to have in
charge of this or are those still current passwords and at that point when you
review it, it gives you peace of mind.
Linda: It definitely does give you peace of mind and in a
crisis situation you’re not thinking very straight, but when you’ve thought
this through ahead of time, you kind of go into that automatic mode. It’s like
okay I know how to do that. That proverbial I know how to ride a bike. I don’t
have to think about it and when you’re in a crisis situation, trust me. You
have a lot to handle and things come at you that even the best laid plans for a
crisis are going to throw things at you that you are not prepared for.
Susan. Agreed. Getting on a more personal note talking about
crisis communication even in families. The importance of having that in place,
a friend of mine, her brother-in-law passed away quite suddenly a few days ago
and I’ve been through enough deaths in the family and the part we don’t count
on is we’re having to handle the estate, handle the person, handle the arrangements,
fly people in whatever it is, what you get hit with and you don’t count on is
the people that are so upset by it that you’re having to stop whatever it is,
emotional ties and your tasks to care for these people who might even be just
distant contacts out of respect. It’s not a lot different. In this situation,
you don’t always understand the ripple effect of crisis in business.
Linda: No and of course you’re always dealing with people
which are the most unpredictable thing on the planet so you will always run
into things that you cannot anticipate and it’s really important that as a team
you understand that people are being hit with things that they did not
anticipate. What I’ve often seen happen as well is when a crisis hits, the team
disintegrates because fingers get pointed and it’s really important to
understand that everybody is getting hit with things that we didn’t anticipate.
As you said, you put your big person’s pants on and say okay, we can’t be
pointing fingers at anybody on the team. We’ve all got to come together and do
the best that we can do, but hopefully you’ve got a really good cohesive team
that you’ve built some trust in on that.
Susan: It’s that credit and blame that seems to seep in
during that situation and a lot of situations and I think that it’s detrimental
to most communication plans. Marketing teams, any team, it’s that team that
needs to give credit and needs to give blame and until you can get out of that,
you’re not solving anything.
Linda: Right and I guess I’ve sort of gone through a few
philosophical questions here. One is do you know who you are? The second one
being is do you know what your philosophy is about communication? I would say
sort of that third and final meti-question before you get to scenario planning is
do you know the difference between being right and being effective?
Susan: Great question!
Linda: They are two very different things because often in
crisis, you want to get the message out that it’s not our fault. We did
everything right. Your attorneys are looking at sort of that defensive mode
perhaps and if you understand the difference between being effective and being
right, you might be able to take a different path so your point is if we’re
going to avoid finger pointing, it’s because we need to be effective right now
and what’s the most important thing is being effective and not necessarily
pushing out the message that we were right, we were right, we were right. It’s
about maintaining trust. It’s about maintaining customers, maintaining revenues,
maintaining your reputation and how do we best do that in a crisis as opposed
to beating through the message of we were right all along and that’s not
necessarily the most effective way to get to your end point, which is coming
out of this unscathed as possible.
Susan: Good point. You’ve give us some really key points.
All of your medipoints on, I’m just rereading them. What’s our philosophy on
communication? Who are we and then the difference between being right and being
effective. We know big companies usually have this in place. Do you see that
most do or do large companies not have these pieces in place?
Linda: Most large brands do have this in place. They do
scenario planning. They do crisis communication planning. In a lot of cases
they actually have a crisis communication team that they’ve built and they go
through this and that’s certainly true of a couple of large brands that have
gone through some problems recently and that have been out in the news. They
had scenario plans for lots of things and primarily focusing on things like
what happens when something bad happens at one of our locations and they’ve got
that scenario plan down, but when something like a data breach happens that had
nothing to do with their own actions, but perhaps was something that was
completely unanticipated. Again, that’s going to hit you from someplace out in
left field, but it doesn’t mean that your processes aren’t the same and if
you’ve got these philosophical questions answered up front, it becomes a lot
easier to put the protocols in place because you’ve already got these
fundamental answers to the questions. We know that our philosophy is engagement
so how are we going to navigate engagement in this particular situation as
opposed to sitting there arguing about whether we fight or fly? You’re not
having that discussion. What you’re having is engagement is where we stand and
how do we navigate that philosophy within this particular situation.
Susan: So for business of fifty and under, smaller
businesses, that probably don’t do all the role play and get all of this in
place, let’s give them, without giving away your professional services, but can
we give them a few start up tips? These three questions are huge and that’s a
great starting point. From there after they’ve answered that, can you give a
few tips on what should be next in their plan as far as creating this type of
solution or the thing that will catch them before they fall.
Linda: I would say the first thing is to bring your sales
people in and ask them what are the things that could really derail us because
it’s the sales people or the customer service people that tend to be on the
front lines and they’re the ones that hear the whispers, that know the
competitive landscape really, really well and so if you’ve got someone in
charge of business development or sales, that’s the first person to come in and
ask the question what can derail our success. What is the worst thing that can
happen to us? That sort of gives you an idea of where some of those hot spots might
be. I would say that’s one of the first things to do. Another thing to do is to
realize that people are going to be looking for information and if you’ve got a
small company, chances are you’re either going to be an online business because
you can scale and keep your business and your numbers low or you’re a fairly
small company. You still need to do scenario planning, but what you need to do
is recognize that the very first and important channel is your website and what
you might want to do is create a page that is specifically for a crisis
situation. Keep it dark. It doesn’t have to be published, but if you already
have it set up with things like who are the contacts, recognizing we need a
summary of the situation, that is really helpful because when a crisis happens
that can be your first place to publish something. What you’re doing is
establishing your website as the hub of the latest and greatest information,
the truth about what is happening.
Susan: Sometimes when businesses are relying on their website,
let’s talk about the GoDaddy debacle and the [unintelligible] one recently,
what’s our next channel where they would go? It can’t just be plan b. It can’t
just be the website. That’s where Twitter and some of the others come into
place. Where else can you quickly say we know it’s down? We are so sorry for
the inconvenience. We are working on it. Direct messages or whatever you need.
David: I was going to say the format that we’re using right
now, a hangout on air can be the greatest tool that somebody could use in a
crisis situation. If I were CEO of a company and there was some kind of crisis
that came in, I would immediately go to Google, hang out on air, and then take
that out and embed it on my website. Take that hangout and imbed it. It’s so easy
to do. It can be done in fifteen minutes if you’ve planned for and have it in
place. What better way to deal with a crisis situation than that immediacy? I
guess you look at network television differently than you look at the Internet.
The internet is right now where television might be five minutes from now or
ten minutes from now or a half hour from now, but we’ve got the tools at our
fingertips to handle it right now.
Susan: That is a great point to totally direct your message
on what you want to say depending on what the situation is, but to have a
YouTube live event waiting for you to pull the trigger on it when you need it
or whichever one you want to use gets you to the same end, live broadcast your
people and your message from wherever they are. They can handle it. They can do
it from their phone if they had to.
Linda: Right, but I think one of the pit falls for those of
us who are so dependant on online media is we can’t forget that not everybody
is digitally connected or that part of our crisis is the internet is down or
our website is down as you said. Recognizing that old-fashioned channels have a
really important function here and that is have you thought about a recorded
message or a special phone number that you provide and a recorded message on
that phone that gets updated. On that do you give people the ability to put in
their mobile phone number so you can text them with updates if that is
necessary? Do you have an email list and if you do, are you utilizing your
email list if you have connectivity to keep people updated or to allow them to
opt in? Most crises happen over a span of days or weeks. The media are the ones
that would love to be updated of course in real time, but don’t forget that y
our customers are going to be saying, especially if you’re a supplier of some
commodity that they need, are you keeping them up to date on what the status
is? If there’s a strike at the port and you can’t get product off the ship, are
you keeping people updated on what’s happening with that strike or with that
disaster there? Don’t overlook the plain old telephone line and the ability to
connect with people via the mobile device that they have as well.
Susan: I’ve been in situations up
against a large company that found us and wanted to sue us for our name - this is Binky Patrol, I’m talking about. They
said, “We own that word when it has to do with babies”. I said, “Really, you’re
going to sue me with what I do for kids in need? Hold on…” and it is a reminder to keep current who are the
contacts at your local paper, your local radio stations and your local
television stations. That still does matter because we can think everyone is
going online to find everything, but they aren’t. The bulk of the population
still turns on the news to CNN or their local channel to see what’s going on.
They don’t do it through their browsers. We like to think that they do, but
they don’t. Who would you call? I made a call to the Times, to the Orange County Register and
within minutes not only did the company back down from their suit, but the company
president contacted me and gave a special permission to use that word for as
long as we want. It was ugly and both reporters called back to tell me to call them any time if they ever say another thing to you. They were like big brothers.
We’ll beat them up for you, and they were going to. That is important and reminds us to again, continue with those relationships.
Linda: Yes and using local media is so easy to connect with
reporters because 98% of them use Twitter and so you can easily connect with
them and the channels and learn who they are and what they cover just by doing
a little research on Twitter and once you know that, it’s fairly easy to find
out what their email address is and what their telephone number is at that
publication and so it is a huge benefit to you to know who your local media
contacts are and to open up a channel with them. Hopefully you know who they
are before something like this happens. For most businesses of any size,
they’re doing some sort of public relations and so they should know who their
local and/or relevant journalists are in their industry.
Susan: They should have a list and this list has to be
maintained and updated quarterly at the minimum. You have to know if that
person is still there and if they are still current. Put them in your circles
on Google+
. Put them on Twitter. Put them in your groups on Facebook,
whatever you need to to keep it all centralized and give your key people access
to that so if you’re not able to get on line but they can on the East coast,
let them get in there. Have somebody in different time zones is also a big
thing to me. Have contacts in additional time zones that aren’t on your same
systems that can get out and get to your information and get it to the right
people.
Linda: Exactly and that brings up another important point
that I wanted to communicate today and that is you need to be sure that whether
you use social media channels or not that you have reserved your profile names
because what happens, we can look at the BP spill, somebody went on and created
a spoof account during the height of the crisis, immediately after the crisis
and of course they were blasting out what appeared to be official messages on
an account called BP and this could happen to you regardless of if you use
Twitter as a channel, but if you have a handle on Twitter, a Facebook page
under your name as an official, and it’s blatantly official, it’s something
that you can turn on at a moment’s notice and start using to prevent someone
from co-opting this situation to destroy your reputation or to be putting out
misinformation so whether you use social media or not, make sure that you go in
and create a GooglePlus profile, a Twitter handle under your company name, a
Facebook page, a Pinterest account. Whatever it is.
Susan: Grab them all!
Linda: Grab them all and then this is usually part of my
discussion about internal policies, but I always encourage my clients to have a
policy because this happens especially in small businesses. An intern comes in
and creates a Facebook page for you or you hire somebody as a contractor who
sets all of your pages up, but you do not have the log in information and so
when we do social media policies, one of the things that I always put in there
as a provision is if you create a page, you must have a central repository for
the password. Now in some situations that’s a bad idea. Facebook for example,
you have to use your personal profile to log in, but the work around there is
someone or someone else in the company needs to be administrator on that
account so that you can post to it. Reserve your names in every platform that
you might find useful, that your customers might be using or your other
stakeholders or the media and then if you need to, keep them dark, but keep a
repository of all those log ins, passwords, who the administrators are as you
mentioned before Susan. Get those channels locked down even if you never ever
use them because I’ve seen it happen to often where somebody wants to co-op the
conversation. Another point is you should also create a specific hashtag that
you know you’re going to use. Hashtags will get created around you and you need
to be aware of those. Hashtags are now used on many platforms so use those key
words, but have them pre-established so that you can communicate those as well.
We’ll be using the hashtag ‘xyz’ so that people know that and can follow that.
Susan: Good point. David do you have any thoughts on this?
David: You guys have made me think about things that I
haven’t thought of about for a long time. I remember Linda when you were
talking and don’t forget the traditional way of doing business. Back in the
90s, I totally forgot about this until I heard you talk. One of my clients back
in the 90s was the American Red Cross and who faces more crisis situations than
the American Red Cross and the moment there was a crisis situation, I was
working with a tele-service company and the individual in that company was
contacted 24/7 and then automatically a phone bank of hundreds of people were
available to take phone calls in that crisis situation. Now it’s a crisis of a
different sort and it’s handled differently, but don’t forget. I’m totally
confused now. Should we use the old way of doing it? Yes. The new way of doing
business today, has it complicated the situation? Probably has complicated it.
There’s more immediacy. Things happen right now, but to your point. Capture
your identity on what? Two hundred, four hundred, a thousand different social
platforms that are out there?
Linda: I think you can probably stick with the most popular
ones, or the ones that your industry, if you’re business to business, Linkedin
might be the most important place for you to be or an industry forum. I deal a
lot with privacy issues and belong to some government committees on that. IT
people who are concerned about privacy live in a different world than Twitter
and so there might be industry forums that are important for you to be on. Not
a thousand platforms, but I would say for public facing companies, a good dozen
of the most popular ones and then for b to b companies really need to be aware
of where their markets are hanging out and discussing industry topics and then
grab identities on those particular forums.
Susan: Be aware of false identities that are out there
posing or that can be confused with you and what they are doing because to not
do that little bit of research is a very ignorant way, I’ve watched clients be
blindsided by someone who had a very slight variation on their name and they
didn’t even know they were out there until bad things started to happen so be aware
of what else is out there that might not be you that people could think is you.
Linda: Right and there is another very simple thing that you
can do to see if a crisis is erupting that you might not otherwise know and
that is simply to use some of these massive tools that are available, many of
them for free, to put up alerts for your brand name and make a habit of
checking on that every day to see how is your brand being mentioned on
everything from Google News to Twitter and Facebook and every place else so you
can aggregate any mentions of your brand. You can do nothing with it except for
watch for an erupting issue that might be coming even if you choose not to
engage in those channels. It can be a very great listening mechanism.
David: The point that you made a few moments ago about using
hashtags, outstanding point to share. I actually did an interview with a
gentleman who lives in Japan and he has developed a whole hashtag tracking kind
of system. Just by you mentioning that, I’m going to go to him and say here’s a
new way to really think about how to use your hashtag. He should have an
emergency hashtag section that people can go to to see how somebody can capture
your hashtag and capture your crisis pretty easily today. It’s not a difficult
task to do it. The other point I wanted to make, I think Twitter is one of the
most brilliant business decisions in my mind was when Twitter said you can have
140 characters to tweet because it makes our thinking very concise. We have to
think in the most basic terms that we possibly can to get the message out
there, but it was a brilliant business decision and also saved billions of
dollars in server space for tweets.
Linda: Exactly.
Susan: We’re getting towards the end of our hour. I can’t
believe it has flown by, but I wanted to thank David for joining us today and
Linda I want people to be able to find you. Where can they find you if they’re
thinking of engaging in somebody with your experience and your level of
expertise in this?
Linda: On my website which is marcominteractive.com, but I’m
a huge GooglePlus user so if you just search Linda Zimmer on GooglePlus you
will find me there and feel free to