The Lessons from Ford Firestone crisis still important today

Yesterday I had the distinct privilege of hosting Jon Harmon presenting a webinar to our PIER Strategy Forum. Jon is the former chief of PR for Ford trucks and was the lead crisis communicator for Ford during the infamous Ford/Firestone crisis of 2000. Jon has written a very compelling book about this event called “Feeding Frenzy.” The book has just been released and I can tell you having read some of the early chapters it is one of the best crisis management books out there. What makes it stand out, in addition to being dead center in the middle of one of the biggest crises in American corporate history, is that Jon tells the story like a novel. All the characters, conflicts, and plot twists are there to make it a great read but in the process Jon pulls out the important lessons learned.

The participants on the call yesterday with us, including a participant from UK, had the benefit of Jon’s wisdom and observations as an insider during this event. Here are a few key lessons I gleaned from Jon’s presentation:

1) Trial lawyers will drive the news cycle. While the company(or companies in this case) are eager for the story to fall off the front pages, trial lawyers have become very adept at stretching out a story. They would leak key documents shortly before the nightly network newscasts with another supposed “bombshell” prompting Dan Rather and others to call for quick comment by Ford or Firestone with little time to research and prepare a response. The link between accuser and media is a happy marriage from their perspective because the coverage furthers the aims of both lawyers and media.

2) The anti-big and anti-corporate mentality means you start a crisis like this deep in a hole. It’s tough to try to protect reputation and credibility when the media and the public has an underlying perception that if you are big, powerful and for profit you are evil and ill-intentioned at the core.

3) The differences between Ford and Firestone made the situation worse. The crisis caused a bitter end to a business relationship that had lasted for over 100 years. It is very useful to see the vast differences between Ford’s approach to communication vs. Firestone’s. The fact that Jon as PR lead was at the table in critical meetings where no Firestone PR people were is just one indication of the management and cultural differences–differences that worked strongly to Ford’s advantage and Firestone’s disadvantage. This is one reason why PR leads should by this book and send it to their CEOs as Christmas presents.

4) The emergency of online networking. The year 2000 was before people were talking about social media, web 2.0 and all that. But this was one of the first events where blogs, activist web sites, and the viral nature of web communications starting playing a role. Now it has emerged as a driving role but the signs were there of what this could mean as others who different agendas and axes to grind against a major company networked together to pressure and seek more negative publicity.

5) Emergence from the depths. One of the most interesting parts of our discussion with Jon was how the company emerged from this event. While it cost Ford over $3 billion in direct costs, the very next year was a record sales year for the Ford Explorer. And now, Ford stands alone as emerging with strong hopes from the current economic crisis among the Big Three. One reason was the serendipitous introduction of the completely redone Explorer with many added features including enhanced safety. No doubt having the NHTSA exonerate the Explorer as not causing the rollover accidents also contributed. But I would have to say, having gotten to know Jon and understand his commitment to truth, honesty, transparency and credibility, and reflecting on his statement about how their legal team and PR team worked effectively together, I would also give more credit to Jon and the Ford management than perhaps he did or would.

Jon can be reached via his blog at Force for Good Communications. Do yourself a favor and get the book.

 

Five Megatrends and One Author Ticked Off at Media

I just posted my thoughts about the 5 megatrends in marketing and how they impact crisis communication. You can find it here on emergencymgmt.

Also I found it interesting that British author Ian McEwen had a nasty run-in with the press. But he realized there was no sense in getting mad, just get even. Apparently he will in his next novel about global warming. He’s including a reporter as a bad guy causing the hero all kinds of problems.

Crisis management–putting your ears to work

I’ve been talking for some time about the rapidly growing role of monitoring as a critical part of crisis communication. Also been saying in presentations that social media and the online conversation is where so many people are going to get their information. That crisis communicators need to understand at best they will participate and the days of control over the information flow are over.

Being involved in a fairly major event in the past week has brought these lessons home. We are using a variety of means to monitor what is going on–everything from PIER MediaTools to view and clip media including broadcast, to Google Alerts, to Twitscoop.

A few quick observations.

1) Media monitoring shows a tremendous amount of media activity but a lot of it is from the fact that media are now major players in social media with their news websites. All print media as well as broadcast use their news sites heavily which makes for a lot of traffic, frequent updates, and a tremendous amount of linking by interested viewers via their blogs and Twitter accounts.

2) Local is global. This is a fairly localized event with only a smattering of national media attention, but the conversation is global. Those interested (or passionate) about topics involved are going to be jumping into the conversation heavily and will keep it going as long as it of interest.

3) People learn from each other. It’s fascinating watching the online conversation and see many of the same news stories or comments showing up over and over on different sites. It’s one of the reasons this monitoring is so important because invariably some get the facts wrong and unless the correct information is readily available or the wrong info is quickly challenged, it does not take long for it to become accepted. The only saying about a lie repeated often enough becoming the truth takes on new urgency in the viral world of social media because it can be repeated a hundred or thousand times in mere minutes or hours.

4) The conversation was always there–but now you can hear it. That is something that really strikes me about a big change in communications and crisis management. All major events stirred lots of conversation–dinner table, office chat, in bars and restaurants, wherever people gather. Except now they don’t gather to have conversations, they do it by text, tweets, blogs, comments, all kinds of social media. And that means you can listen in on a lot of those conversations. Sometimes it seems its like the roar of too much conversation in an overcrowded bar. But if you focus in a little, you can hear fascinating things. And these can give you great insight into how things are turning, what the concerns are, what questions need to be answered, what information is going sideways, etc. In other words, the conversation will drive the communication response as much or maybe more in some cases than the events of the response itself.

5) Participate–not control. It’s is still very difficult for most response leaders and those who have been in public communication for a long time to really grasp this. In this world of heightened conversation, you don’t control the information. At best, you participate. But you do this by providing a continuous feed of of relevant, up to date information about what is going on. You can’t participate if you insist on sticking to a one press release a day strategy. And you can’t participate by putting all your eggs in the press conference basket–as important as it is. You participate by being the best, most reliable source for what is really happening. Then, you will find, as did in this incident, that soon your website will be given shortened url and sent around the twittersphere and blogosphere as the fastest, most relevant source of what is going on.

An analysis of the Superfreakonomics debate

don’t have time to comment much as busy helping work a major response at the moment but this WSJ article captures much of what I was trying to say about this debate.

 

More examples of news via Twitter, plus: Is Social Media a fad?

I’ve been talking in my presentations quite a bit about how Twitter is how the mainstream is getting more of its news and how increasingly Twitter itself is spreading the news. Here’s another great example–the debris on the Bay bridge that snarled traffic for hours or more.

Thanks to Gabe, I was alerted to this YouTube video (nearly a million views so obviously I’m not the first to see it) that seeks to answer the question of whether or not Social Media is a fad. I think it is a great video, very well done and interesting accumulation of facts, but one thing keeps bothering me.

Why Social Media? Why not call it the internet, or even Web 2.0 like social media used to be called. After all, what is called social media today is really internet applications that have been very widely adopted and adopted in particular to help people do what they’ve been doing since hiding out in caves: connecting with each other talking about things that interest them. The internet as a series of related technologies makes that connecting possible in ways never dreamt of before. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are all just examples of some of those related technologies that have gotten tremendous interest and public play. I can virtually guarantee that all things hot now in social media are already well on the way to becoming dodo birds (even Facebook growth has tailed off significantly and Twitters’ precipitously). That doesn’t mean that social media will go away. The real question ought to be is the internet a fad? But the answer to that is so obvious that obviously if someone did that they wouldn’t get a million views.

The best resource for social media and internet use policy

At least it is the best resource I’ve seen.

Here is a very extensive list of sample policy statements and policies in place at various prominent organizations.

I found it on a blog post providing some good advice about dealing with legal obstacles to social media use in organizations.

The hot debate on global warming

I’m finding the continuing blogwar and public interchange over Levitt and Dubner’s new book Superfreakonomics and its discussion of geoengineering as a possible solution to global warming very interesting. I want to thank Joseph Romm, the environmental blogger heavily engaged in this debate, for taking the time to comment here.

The attacks and counterattacks go on and here is the latest from the Superfreakonomics blog on the New York Times website. In it Dubner, who is a very clear writer, tries to clear the air and get to the heart of the matter about the issues they raised and the storm of controversy these issues appear to have caused.

I am trying hard not to get involved in the substance of the debate because global warming is certainly not my area of expertise. Instead, I am trying to look at this from an issue management and crisis management standpoint to see what I and others can learn from how this blogwar and controversy is being handled by both sides.

My comment here is that Dubner makes a valiant effort to separate the arguments and get some clarity around what the real issues are. I think he does a pretty good job of that but no doubt his critics will disagree. And that gets to the fundamental problem. The real issue is about really about motive and agenda I believe. Who Dubner is tangling with are environmental activists with a very clear motivation: they want people to change their behavior, governments to change policy, industry to change processes in order to reduce our imprint on the world and the climate. The data that has emerged about climate change has given them strong scientific backing. They do not want to have any solutions seriously considered that would take the pressure off the actions of individuals, companies and governments. Certainly not now, when it looks like there is solid progress being made in stimulating the kind of change that many of these activists have been working for for years. In my mind, the rational presentation of geoengineering as one of many potential solutions to the huge challenge is extremely disturbing to them because it may divert attention and reduce the progress that is being made.

If I am right, it explains the hyperbole and emotional reaction to this book. There is fear evident in this reaction. Fear that the science and reason behind a geoengineering solution might just be sound and the sounder it is, the more it diverts from the mission.

What does this have to do with issue management? A lot, because it doesn’t really make sense to conduct a debate on one level when the real debate is going on at a different level. I’ve dealt with similar situations on not such a global scale several times. I think it is useful to take a step back, try to understand where the objections really lie, and address them as directly and openly as you can. For Dubner that would probably mean asking a question–if saving the world from catastrophe is the main goal, wouldn’t any and all potential solutions be welcomed? And if those solutions are not welcomed, is it because saving the world from catastrophe is not the goal but perhaps, getting people to live and act and behave in ways better for the planet is really the goal? The two are not the same. That is where this debate is really at in my mind–what is honestly and truly the goal.

 

Documenting the accelerating decline of mainstream media

Any longtime crisisblogger reader, and certainly any reader of my book Now Is Too Late, will note that I have referred to the post media world many times. In fact, it was the working title for Now Is Too Late until my publisher suggested a title change. Today two news stories came to my attention that seems to make it more and more clear that we are getting closer to a post media world if we can’t say we are in one already.

First, the LA Times documents the continuing and dramatic slide in newspaper circulation. A 10.6% decline in 6 months compared to same period the year before. That’s pretty amazing.

But this next story, about how marketers are forgoing advertising with traditional media in order to reach mass audiences with brand building is even more telling. You would think advertisers would be flocking to the media–certainly there have to be some awesome deals in buying advertising and advertising is typically bought in a pretty straightforward way with a cost per thousand calculation. Match up the right demographics and buy by the numbers at the best price. Those numbers have to be pretty attractive right now, some smoking deals I would think. But advertisers are finding they can create their own channels–on YouTube. (There is a chapter in Now Is Too Late, written in 2001 that is titled: You Are the Broadcaster). Here’s what Mark Haas from one marketing firm had to say:

“You build a channel on YouTube and you get millions of views,” Mr. Hass said. “And these people are coming from all over, and it’s more about their interest in your product, as opposed to the readership and viewership of a particular medium. It’s horizontal. If you wanted to reach that many people using traditional media, you would have to pitch and place in dozens of outlets.”

For crisis communicators, the lesson should be clear. Stop thinking media first. Stop thinking your job is to put out a press release about what is going on. Stop thinking the most important thing you will do in a crisis is set up and run a good press conference. Stop thinking the only questions you have time to answer are from reporters. Stop being so media-centric.

Start thinking direct. Start thinking about the people who matter most to your future–the people who if they thought bad of you would cause your organization some nightmares. Start thinking about engaging rather than distributing. Start thinking about participating instead of controlling. Start thinking about how you are going to interact with hundreds or thousands–personally–when you really need to. Start realizing that You are the Broadcaster.

 

Anatomy of a credibility war–global warming and Superfreakonomics

Here’s a blog war that seems to be heating up faster than our climate: The New York Times guest editorial column by Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner takes on a very strident attack by a prominent environmental blogger.

From a reputation management standpoint, this kind of interchange is fascinating. Here are a few of my observations:

1) Your viewpoint on this–whether you agree with blogger Joe Romm or Dubner depends mostly on your own biases and perceptions. We never really start on neutral ground. I happen to be a big fan of Freakonomics and admired their courage to bring up issues such as abortion and falling crime rates in the face of the political correctness police. So that is my bias and I approach this war from that standpoint.

2) It’s all about credibility. If you take the time to dissect Dubner’s response to Romm’s attack you can see it goes directly to the heart of whether or not Romm can be trusted and believed. This is where such reputation wars always end up in my mind which means the first caution to any communicator is never ever ever give your opponents any reason to question your complete honesty–including what you don’t say.

3) Borrowed credibility–here the debate is largely over what position one of the subjects in the book–Ken Caldeira who according to both seems to be one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. Both are making claims about what he says and doesn’t say about the reporting. From that standpoint, it seems to be that Dubner delivered a knockout punch to Romm when he demonstrated that Caldeira’s denial of a statement in the book was from Caldeira’s failure to carefully edit it and not due to the author’s lack of integrity as Romm is trying to prove.

4) Tone matters–Romm can’t help himself in his outrage. There are certainly times when outrage is appropriate and should be used. But Dubner’s even tone and very careful dissection of the argument vs. Romm’s more emotional ranting communicates that Romm is just deeply disturbed by what the book is saying and Dubner is understanding this is about who is to be believed more than who is most passionate. Romm does his argument a disservice in my mind by his tone. Lending a lot of credence to the statement in the book about the religion of global warming.

Two healthcare communication webinars coming up

I’m very pleased to have been asked to present two national webinars on healthcare communications next week.

PRSA is offering one on swine flu (or H1N1) communications and lessons learned–I’ll be doing with with respected health communication expert Stephen Davidow. This one will be Tuesday, October 27 at 3 pm EDT (noon my time on PDT).

The second one is for Progressive Healthcare Conferences on October 29 at 1 pm. This is on Twitter, Social Media, etc. for healthcare crisis communication. This will deal somewhat with communicating with employees as well as external audiences and the media.

Hope you can make it to one of these!