I’ve read Bob Garfield for years and am sorry I am missing the PRSA conference this year–first year in many that I’ve missed it. The report of Garfield’s keynote is right on target in my mind and very necessary for crisis communicators. The message is simple–it’s a completely different world out there.

Here’s a key quote:

“The digital revolution isn’t some kind of news magazine headline,” he said. “It’s an actual revolution yielding revolutionary changes including, but not limited to, the disintegration of the media and marketing infrastructures that have worked in perfect symbiosis for almost four centuries.”

The “disintegration of the media and marketing infrastructures…” “perfect symbiosis for almost four centuries.”

On the one hand, what we are seeing is unprecedented on a scale of Gutenberg. On the other hand, it is following predictable patterns. When I was growing up in mid-50s, there were a handful of magazines that existed and were read by millions: Time, Life, Look, Good Housekeeping, etc. By the time I was teaching in the mid-70s, many were gone and were replaced by hundreds of thousands of much more special interest publications. By the time I was in business in the mid to late 80s, I was publishing 5 very special interest monthly magazines myself and by now there were millions. Today, there are hundreds of millions–but increasingly using the internet for publishing rather than paper, ink and the US Postal Service. Is publishing dead because Life and Look are gone forever? Heck no! Publishing is alive and well and being done by almost everyone who has the slightest desire to put words on a screen.

PR isn’t dead–the opportunities are more pressing than ever. Crisis communication isn’t dead just because the game has shifted from talking to a few reporters with massive audiences to talking to massive audiences who talk to a few reporters. We’ve just gone from control to engagement, from speaking to participation.

For the past few months whenever I have been presenting to groups on crisis communication or Joint Information Center operations I have said that the most important job of crisis communication today is rumor management. It most certainly is not putting out press releases, and it may not be that important to put out information releases at all–depending on the event as we will see. The reason is simply that with social media those publics out there have access to all kinds of very fast information they didn’t have before. The emergency management community is struggling with the issue, which I blogged about recently, about how do you handle things when people out there know more than you do?

I was speaking at a state conference of emergency managers about this phenomenon and one of the attendees came up to me afterwards and said it just happened to him. He was responding to a fatality car accident and by the time he got to the hospital, the parents of the victim were already there. They knew before he did.

So in major events that are visible to the public, such as Flight 1549, the public will know more faster than the responders and probably also the media. Such is the power of those little devices we carry in our pockets and the network that makes them live and work. But, one of the truisms of crisis communication is that the initial information about an event is always wrong. And with a lot of people speaking from their perspective a lot of what is communicated about any event is going to be wrong. That’s where crisis communication comes in and why rumor management is fast becoming the biggest and most important job. You have to know what is being said and you have to be able to respond and correct misinformation very quickly. If a lie becomes the truth when it is repeated often enough, just think how often a lie can be repeated when it has gone viral. You’ve got to have the ability to stop it in its tracks before those tracks turn out to be a big honking tank bearing right down on you.

But how? Monitoring has become one of the biggest jobs in the JIC or the Crisis Command Center. I’m modifying crisis plans I’m working on to beef up the staffing for the Monitoring and Rumor Management unit. A sizeable event we were just involved in demonstrated how critically important this monitoring is and how it drives the information that is required.

Fortunately there is an increasing array of excellent tools available to do the monitoring–many or most involving online searches. And many, but not all, are free. And monitoring tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated which means that we have to keep evolving with them. Brian Solis, one of the widely recognized thought leaders in social media has an interesting post today about the evolution of search.

If anyone has any experience with monitoring services or rumor management during a crisis, please let me know. This is a very important topic and wouldn’t mind having a few guest posts on it from people who have been through the mill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.