Crisis PR can help to protect an organization or encourage long-term change.

I stumbled upon the story, “PR Students Learn How to Handle Crisis for Clients,” in the Cape May County Herald written by Al Campbell.

I am not 100 percent sure where Cape May County is, but it appears to be in Pennsylvania. Regardless, I think it’s great that their local community college is giving students an opportunity to explore public relations generally and crisis PR specifically.

A few nuggets from the story include:

• It is important to keep the public informed by use of every available means.
• Since Sept. 11, 2001, organizations are more focused on preparedness.
• The most important thing in a crisis is to be able to refer to a plan so you are not scrambling.
• If someone posts inaccurate information about your organization online, instead of engaging that person, it is best to simply post the truth from an official standpoint.
• The first few hours should be considered the “golden hours” when it is essential to deliver the facts that are known in order to minimize baseless rumors and inaccuracies.
• Whenever possible, it is best that a company chief executive should be the source of information in a crisis.

These are all very solid observations and it sounds like a very valuable class for these students.

Of course, in the real world what might seem like common sense can be pushed aside. Human nature is to resist the unwanted scrutiny and hunker down to work to fix whatever is messed up. The role of the crisis PR pro is often to advocate for taking the difficult path in which an organization must  acknowledge problems and mistakes, and begin the often painful process of change.

What this means for the PR practitioners who are reading is that information security must move up your list of potential vulnerabilities. If you have not refreshed your crisis communications plan in the past year or more, please do so and pay special attention to potential IT issues and the impact they can have on your organization’s ability to operate.

I have been trying to keep tabs on Sony’s response to the cyber attack on its Playstation Network over the past several weeks. It appears to have been a very well planned and highly sophisticated assault intended to gather the personal and financial information of subscribers. Something getting attention in the trades but not mentioned much in mainstream media is that the attack was launched using Amazon’s S3 cloud servers, which is important for at least two reasons I can immediately think of: it suggests that cyber criminals will be using cloud computing platforms to launch future attacks and it makes it exceedingly difficult for authorities to track the wrongdoers.

As seems to be the case every time a Japanese company screws up, the Sony team has effectively shrugged its shoulders and said its executives have done a great job responding to the attack. As far as I’ve been able to gather, they have provided zero insight into what specific preventative steps they took prior to the problem to secure their subscribers’ data and they have not offered specifics about what they are doing going forward to make sure data is secure.

In fact, Sony has effectively dismissed the notion that they CAN secure users’ data, which seems pretty amazing for a company that delivers services via the Web. The video below is from the Wall Street Journal with their technology writers discussing the comments from Sony:

As I said at the front, I am by no means a security expert, but I do know that companies can’t just shrug off responsibility because the crooks are too good at what they do. Companies that provide goods and services via the Internet have a responsibility to provide a safe environment in which customers can do business with them. In the absense of that, they should cease to provide services via the Web.

Remember when Firestone (another Japanese company) spent forever telling us that there wasn’t anything they could do about the blowouts that caused SUVs to tumble down highways like bowling balls? It was Ford’s fault. It was the poor pavement used. It was the poor maintenance. It was the overly aggressive drivers. Ultimately, after way too many accidents and deaths, Firestone pulled all their SUV tires and recalled all of the tires already on the road. They finally had the guts to step back, take dramatic and definitive action to ensure a safe customer experience.

That is the difficult decision that Sony is apparently not ready to make.

P.S. to Amazon and other cloud providers: you have Terms of Service for a reason and you better be able to enforce them. Lawsuits related to the Sony debacle are already stacking up and I would have to think the Amazon has liability, no matter how much they insist that they are just providing computing power and nothing else.

My wife read the story and the fact that popped out was that the woman was driving a Toyota.

And that is the legacy of Toyota’s ham handed approach to crisis communication over the past six months. If a person is killed driving a Toyota now, at least a part of your brain immediately jumps to the possibility that the car could have contributed to the circumstances leading up to the accident.

How does a person get hit by a train? The accelerator gets stuck? The brakes malfunction? Was she driving a Toyota? Yes. Oh.

Nick Morgan wrote a great piece posted on the Forbes Web site, “Almost Everyone Gets PR Wrong,” in which he details why it does not make sense for a company or individual defend their former positioning once there is a drumbeat of bad news. This runs counter to human nature — we want to fix the problem and return to business as usual. But that is a losing battle.

Morgan suggests that instead companies should change their narrative. Change the way they think of themselves and tell their story. Ultimately, they must change their story because whatever problem they’ve endured has changed the way their communities think of them.

Because our brains retain stories better than any other form of information, we develop shortcuts to handle all the information we need to in the modern world. The most important shortcut is the narrative. The narrative is the quick story that has developed over a long period of time for any organization, company or important public figure. It’s the way we store and organize the information.

Toyota had been the quality car. Volvo is the safety car. BMW is the performance car. Mercedes is the luxury car. Porsche is the sports car.

Now, as it works through the recalls, Toyota appears to want to return to its positioning as the quality car. It won’t work. They need to re-imagine what it is the brand can be, but quality is not it. For many years to come, if a Toyota is involved in a mishap, the public will question whether the car contributed to the wreck. A brand can’t simultaneously be connected with quality AND suspicion.

Instead, Toyota can build upon what it is learning during this period — that it needs to be a customer-focused company. This was Saturn’s original positioning and it was incredibly powerful. But over time, Saturn was folded into the GM umbrella and lost what made it special in the mid 90s. Today, the position has been abandoned with the death of the Saturn brand. For the most part, Toyota drivers love their cars and have rallied in defense of the brand. Their positive experiences with their local dealerships handling the recall have amplified their positive feelings. There is already a community there.

Toyota will only prolong its problems if it seeks to defend its former positioning as a quality car. It must move on and embrace a new narrative. Other companies that have found themselves in similar straits have learned that taking decisive action to change propelled them on a positive course and punctuated the end of their crises.

Please take a few moments to click through the slides. I found the latest data on CEO attitudes, which is culled from the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 12th Annual Global CEO Survey and the IBM Global CEO Survey) to be particularly useful. The idea is that you need to understand what the CEO thinks is important before you can speak to him or her as an equal. That means spending your time learning some of the fundamentals of business finance, as well.

I also am applying some of the writings of Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers to the practice of PR counseling. Gladwell describes how destructive mitigated speech that sugarcoats the facts can be in the midst of a crisis. It is something that the public relations community needs to be mindful of because we tend to think the CEO has everything under control. As soon as you begin to realize that the CEO is depending on the team of leaders for advice and counsel, you can begin to understand that you have a responsibility to step up and forcefully tell it like you see it.

Thanks to the schedulers for inviting me to speak.