by Steve Adubato, PhD
Information is everywhere. It’s impossible not to communicate in a world dominated by viral and social media technological advances and a public with an insatiable appetite to be informed. For corporations and individual professionals, the communication environment has changed so dramatically over the past decade that it cries out for a new and more responsive and sophisticated approach to a crisis.
I wrote a book a few years ago called “What Were They Thinking?”, in which I featured the crisis communication strategy employed by Johnson & Johnson in the 1982 Tylenol tampering scandal. The same book analyzed the 1989 Exxon Valdez fiasco. However, both cases would have played out differently if they had occurred in 2010. Simply put, the communication demands are much greater than ever. The bar is higher. Technology not only allows for instantaneous communication, but causes most people to raise their expectations for what you, as a professional or corporation, are willing to share.
Further, the traditional corporate mentality, often driven by the legal department to “say nothing” in public unless forced to, isn’t going to get the job done. For years, companies would hope that embarrassing incidents would just blow over and run their course. The thinking was if you could survive a one or two day story in newspapers and electronic media, you could go back to business as usual. But in an age of YouTube video and easy access to information that was deemed to be private or confidential, those rules have changed dramatically
It is a safe bet for any professional or corporate executive to assume that virtually everything you do and say can and will become public. We are talking about phone conversations, text messages, e-mail, incidents captured on cell phone video cameras, you get the idea. The “media” is no longer the traditional television networks and established newspapers. The media landscape needs to be redefined as a multi-layer “information” platform.
Simply put, virtually everyone we come in contact with can be a citizen journalist. It could happen at a public meeting with no major media coverage, in which you do or say something that is captured by someone in the audience on video. Just ask Michael Richards. Do you think he really expected a few years back that his out of control racist rant would be captured on someone’s cell pone? Or what about Mel Gibson? The list goes on and on, and while celebrity cases get the most attention, the principles are the same whether you are an insurance executive, school principal or the head of a hospital who does or says something in a public (or even not so public) environment that is captured on audio and/or video tape and then goes “viral”.
The bottom line to all this is that information and communication technology is so far ahead of our ability to develop smart, strategic and timely communication strategies that it’s a time bomb waiting to explode. I strongly propose that organizations that are serious about communicating and competing in the current instantaneous information environment start asking themselves some tough questions about how they would respond to certain hypothetical scenarios and incidents that are likely to occur that could potentially be embarrassing.
And, finally, for those who say they have standard operating procedures or policies to safeguard against such embarrassing viral / internet based incidents, I call this wishful thinking. And as I’ve said before in this column, wishful thinking is no substitute for a legitimate crisis communication game plan.